What if Nukes Weren't Superweapons?

Every single one of you is stuck in this binary presence/absence nuclear paradigm from TA and SupCom. And this is to say nothing of having a frivolous debate about "real life" antinuke systems (which do not work) where even if they did work, it would be irrelevant to a discussion of how to design PA to create the best gameplay.


Strategic Defense Grid

Anyway, it seems to me that PA needs to graduate in scale from the binary presence/absence nuclear warfare paradigm in TA and SupCom. If nukes are powerful, but small compared to the entire scope of a whole game, then they can be cheap. Consequently, we also have cheap, localized antinuke. Cheap nukes and cheap antinuke means there will be more of both, at varying densities around a planet.

This means that a player is going to have a grid of nuke defense across their territory, of varying density. Critical areas warrant more antinuke defense, where more outlying or less important areas might have minimal missile defense, just to discourage a cheap nuclear kill. The enemy has to want it- and will probably overcommit (and thus waste) missiles due to lack of information about the exact antinuke density.

It is also a good idea to allow missile defense to fire at any hostile missile flying within range, not just missiles targeted at a point within their radius. This allows a player who controls more territory to build antinuke systems in the periphery of their territory, and act as an antinuke buffer against missiles fired over that area against targets deeper in their controlled territory. This also creates an incentive for a player to build nuke silos in odd locations to get better launch angles, or use missile submarines to put nukes in a better position to penetrate the enemy strategic missile defense grid.

Any units which leave the player's missile defense area without mobile antinuke are potentially vulnerable to being nuked. However, there are quite a few built-in protections. Firstly, small forces aren't worth nuking to begin with. If the enemy commits nukes to take out a small force, chalk that one up as a windfall for the player getting nuked. Secondly, the enemy has to spot them first. Even large forces might rely on the fog of war to hide them from the enemy, who won't just blind-nuke into the fog on the off-chance it will hit something. And third, mobile units are much harder to destroy with fixed-target missiles, even if they have a large blast. The difficulty of destroying a mobile army is compounded with the fog of war. More distant targets means more travel time for the missile, making hitting mobile targets much less likely, and may discourage them from using the missile at all, to avoid the waste of a complete miss.


Launcher and Defense Design

The question is- how should these nuke launchers and nuke defense mechanics be designed? Not how they function in reality.

In TA and SupCom, a nuclear-missile launching structure or unit only fires one missile at a time. Given the high strength of these missiles relative to the scope of the game, this limitation makes perfect sense. I propose that the design of launchers and antinukes be changed from TA and SupCom.

If nukes are going to be smaller relative to the game's scale (solar system) then the one-missile limitation becomes unnecessary. If a missile submarine has a rack of a dozen SRBM nukes which it can fire simultaneously, potentially at different targets, then the use of nukes becomes a question of how many against what target- not merely a presence or absence of antinuke with respect to a single missile.

The numbers of missiles and the number of missiles an antinuke can intercept are both subject to playtesting balance. But the basic principle is that a player might fire pretty much all their missiles simultaneously at a single target, if they so desire. Against all but the most critical target, and against all but the most heavily-defended area, this would be incredibly wasteful. Against light antinuke, perhaps only three or four nukes are needed to make one of them slip past the missile defense.

The critical feature here is that the launch capability is cheap, and the missiles themselves are priced to be available, but not something you can casually waste left and right like infantry bots. Nukes are like IKEA light bulbs- they sell you the light fixture for nothing to make you buy their lightbulbs.


Missile Production

The tricky part of this sort of design is governing missile production itself. If seems to me that the majority of the cost of a unit like a strategic missile submarine in SupCom isn't the launch capability per se, but rather the ability to manufacture nukes. Any unit capable of independently manufacturing nuclear missiles is going to need a bit of a price tag to prevent someone from massively parallel missile production.

In my opinion the best solution would be to treat a nuclear missile as a transportable unit which must be loaded into a unit which can launch nukes. Most of the launchers don't actually build them, but rather they are transferred nukes that were produced by a different, significantly more expensive, structure or unit.

Units in the field might have a much larger stockpile of nukes than in TA/SupCom. A strategic missile sub might carry a dozen or more. But they can't independently build them, meaning you are spending a quite limited resource each time you fire. Furthermore, the total cost of the missiles onboard significantly outweighs the cost of the submarine, meaning it is very important to keep it alive.

However the construction order is much more convenient, where a player stockpiles defensive nukes, and then constructs a mobile launcher and transfers it some missiles. By contrast, in SupCom, the player spends a large amount of time and resources building a strategic missile sub, which then takes even more time and resources to build itself a missile before it becomes useful.

But this is a game of giant robot battles, not a game of nuke slinging.

The kind of expense that goes into a nuke is not unlike trying to build an experimental. So why not treat nukes like an experimental? In this case, the closest match for a nuke is the Aeon CZAR. Instead of a gantry, you have a nuke pad. Instead of a death laser, it explodes. Instead of shooting air units, it explodes. Instead of falling from the sky and exploding when it dies... yep. You guessed it. It explodes.

Basically, the entire point of the nuclear experimental is to charge into the enemy base and explode.

The revamped SMD in this case is an anti-experimental defense, dealing instant death to singular high value units in range.

Why do all that when you can simply make them an interplanetary weapon(it shouldn't be much of them already) and make it indispensable this way?
It won't attack the whole planet. It won't be too cheap. But it will enable you to attack the enemy base directly from your planet. Not sending a horde of goddamn robots which will be broken soon afterwards, giving enemy the remains, not destroying the planet along with the base. Just direct attack.
Isn't this already a great niche?

rockobot, creating a weapon of this type isn't impossible at all in real life. We just don't have the technology yet.

comham
1. Topol M isn't disposable.
2. I don't see a reason for making a disposable missile and getting an absolutely useless unit after.

So, basically what you're saying is you would rather players fire artillery at each other from separate planets for hours on end rather than actually fight with units?

Because that sounds extremely boring, and extremely stupid in terms of gameplay, where whoever has more cannons wins. Perhaps the ability might be available at a prohibitive cost, but to have this be a central gameplay aspect of PA would be just dreadful.

In fact I think your comments above indicate you don't actually like strategy games. I think you actually would rather have a very trivial, composition-centric rock-paper-scissors, raw-numbers-comparison deterministic approach to RTS.

"Doing all that" is this little thing called thinking which you might want to try sometime, if you can pull yourself away from SupCom 2 long range artillery long enough to spell the word.

If all you're gonna do with a nuke is fry the electronics, then yes it'll go off. Current anti-missile lasers target the fuel tanks, not the electronics. The fuel tank explodes. Worst case: the engine only fails and the nuke plunges down. Best case: the explosion takes out the nuke. Since timing of the explosives on the subcritical matter has to be precise, an explosion would easily destabilize that.



The idea of a laser defence in PA is, that the MIRV nukes would have a lesser HP and thus more easily be taken out, while a single nuke would have significantly more health.

Also, this was only one thing: i don't see why we can't have a laser shoot down nukes in the first place, without any anti-nuke missile. This apparently is a game where interplanetary travel is real easy. Making a visible-spectrum gigawatt laser should not be that hard.

*spits out coffee*

have you read what Planetary Resources plans on doing? there's NOTHING unrealistic about that

1. Looks like you're the one who doesn't like actually thinking. Using a unit cannon to send units to freshly-estabilished forward base would be way less efficient than nuking them and hindering their advance.
2. If you're sticking to SupCom 2(which was a total disappointment and wasn't played too much before return to FA) I have nothing to say to you, except a words of condolence. Have you ever heard of a game called PERIMETER?
3. I like RTS no less than you do. I just think about wider set of tools and ways to use them. Using interplanetary weapon to weaken enemy before the invasion which can be prevented by them with advantage of being already here with prepared defences is viable strategy for me. If it isn't for you... Give up your energy grid, then. Your idea of trying to convert a strategical weapon to tactical just because there is a new strategical layer with even more scale shows lack of vision.

Why not just take nukes out of the game if that's your attitude? The point is to balance them vs their effectiveness and if we only have one type of nuke with several ways to defeat it for any situation, then it's practically worthless.

If we're going to have the argument on if nukes are a weapon suitable only for surprise attacks, then we already have a thread for that.

Here is a suggestion... Interplanetary Nukes! You could shoot a nuke from 1 planet, and have it hit another planet! This is following the idea of modern day missiles a little bit.
Nukes today usually go into outer space, then fall on their target. So in the end, nukes wouldn't be as "worthless" as you proposed. BTW, you could have the interplanetary silos and nukes be more expensive. Another perk to this would also mean it would take a longer time for it to reach the target, allowing the enemy to prepare so it wouldn't be too OP'd. One problem, people might nuke spam on some hidden asteroid, with hundreds of silos, I don't really know the solution to that.

A method is not a guarantee. Any answer that requires direct intervention runs the risk of the player not having the right units, not having them in the right spot, or simply not noticing until it's too late.

The point of the SMD is that you're not paying to hard counter the nuke. You're paying to not worry about them, so that you can focus elsewhere.

Besides, we already have super weapons in the form of asteroids and maybe metal worlds. These are the new and improved game enders, map changing weapons that are virtually impossible to block. They can't be stopped by conventional weapons, they can't be stopped by SMD, and the trailer shows a nuke that mitigates damage at best.

I'm curious why you think nukes need to be more difficult to deal with? Scoring an SMD kill is already going to cause a lot of grief.

Exactly what I've been saying all along.

I don't have anything to add, except...

Your posts are great but please mind the tone. This attitude does not help the discussion or the forum. I would rather not see the board end up like some Bioware cesspit.

In all honesty, I don't really see the issue with nukes being superweapons. In SupCom, I'd always build nuke defense before a launcher, just so that I don't have to worry about getting nuked. Why can't the same apply to PA?

:lol:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1 If we can give it our best shot now, I don't see why the super-interplanetary-mechs-o-doom of PA can't have a fully functioning model.

uhm

that is PRECISELY the problem. Either you're dead because you were too late with nuke defence or you are immune to nukes.

You forgot about the ability to destroy enemy antinuke and launch one afterwards.

I still don't see an issue with a nuke behaving exactly as it should, or making them obselete with a SMD. Either you die from the nuke, or build an SMD so you don't have to worry about them.

Having only a single answer to nukes creates a binary hard counter on/off victory condition. This is BAD gameplay and should be avoided at all costs. That is the same reason why a nuke intercepting laser is a terrible idea, because it is a perfect hard counter to a weapon that demands heavy resources with every shot.

Both SMD needs greater utility, and nukes need more than a single way to be stopped.

1) PA already has game ending weapons that are not nukes. The KEW asteroid and death star metal world can both do an excellent job of destroying worlds and being largely indefensible.

2) PA is about robot battles, not nuclear duels. You may find greater joy in the Defcon games.

While an unanswered nuke may be able to scar a planet, any proper defense should serve to minimize damage.

Remember when SMD were supposed to have a chance of missing?

But that didn't really happen, and is one of my only dissapointments from SupCom.

So if SMD being a hard counter is a problem, and we are not going for diffrent types of nukes then why not give the SMD a chance to miss?

I personally liked the nukes of FA. Sure, you are almost immune when you have anti-nuke defenses, but the nuke can still be used other places on the battlefield. Also, it gives the attacker an extra end-game objective.

On a side-note: I remember one battle in FA, where i sent around 250-300 t1 bombers to bomb my enemy's anti-nuke silo, however he had enough flak and fighters to kill each bomber before a single bomb was released. However, the flak killed my bombers just at a perfect spot, meaning that all of the bomber wrecks crashed into the anti nuke. Well, i guess that is one strategy - just fill the sky with scrap to rain down upon your enemy! Good times.

But SMD is not a hard counter. It's expensive, has limited capacity, is vulnerable to sniping, and is easily overwhelmed. It is more effective than a nuke launcher for cost, but that's a hardness somewhere along the lines of chewy caramel or hard taffy.

The problem is that SMD was the only counter to nukes, and that was the only thing it did. So the gameplay was like flipping a switch. You got too much and wasted your money, or you didn't have enough and got killed. The middle ground was virtually non existent.

For a greater insight on the perils of binary gameplay, please reference "Goldilocks and the 3 Bears".

There is in fact a perfectly serviceable way to deal with nukes without spending a single cent more than you would have otherwise- and that is simply to spread yourself out over enough land area that there's no single target which is worthwhile to nuke.

If maps are big enough, and nukes are small enough in blast radius relative to the entire planet's size, then you don't even need antinuke. Just spread out.

Nukes are an effective tool for breaking localized hard-entrenched positions, and would be vastly cheaper than a planet-killer which would wipe out the entire planet (which you may want to capture instead). However it can be countered by local antinuke defenses. Which can themselves be countered by destroying them, or by just firing a LOT of nukes at the target area.