What if Nukes Weren't Superweapons?

Ah, I see. Thank you.

More often than not, I would play with turn nukes off.

Nucular sheilds would be great.

I say let's have... three tiers of "nuclear" weapons:

Fission: This is your bog-standard nuke, cheap, easy to build, fast to build, does a fair amount of damage.

Fusion: Tier two, much more powerful than fission, more expensive but still relatively cheaper.

Antimatter: Expensive as all get-out, will absolutely destroy anything on a continent and can only be built by orbital units/structures. Expensive as in "you need a dozen completely devoted metal and a dozen energy systems to make a single missile, and it still has a chance of going off prematurely".

Why not make the fission bomb this games tactical missile?

Keep the fusion as the stratigic missile and then have the anti-matter as the advanced missile or what not.

The difference between fission and fusion is not as big as you think (and yes, my school also taught it wrong). They both rely on the same atomic energy, which in this case is the mass defect.

The difference between a fission and a fusion bomb is much more analogous to the difference between a Deflagration and a Detonation. Except with atoms.

Strategic missiles are pretty advanced as is.
Antimatter is more like... a planet killing missile.

I can understand the appeal of tactical missiles, but they're kind of lame. They are a very small scale unit that doesn't work without lots of micro. Any unit that demands individual attention should be doing something pretty damn important.

They did, they were the perfect counter to shielded bases, as as mobile units they even fired themselves.

Tacticle missiles were perfect as anti-base units and structures, so I have no idea why you would say that they were lame.

You mean missiles that do 6000 damage aren't important? The attention needed to use them was a big balance factor to offset the high damage.

All in all I'm not against those kinds of weapons, so long as there is some way to defend yourself, like TMD and there aren't too many of them(as in selection, not amount built).

Mike

When it comes to a game of nigh unlimited scale, manual fire units have to be important. TMLs aren't. So many other things can do the job, do it better, and do it without the need for intervention.

PA doesn't have shields. The new goal is to overwhelm his missile defense. The "shield breaking" power of a stationary, manual fire TML no longer applies.

Mobile TMLs were cool, but they worked on a different scale than the stationary type. They can't really be compared.

Is killing a single tank important? No. Get real. Insane single target damage has been covered in a form that functions as a nuke defense, experimental killer, and general purpose kill gun. Since it has obvious primary targets, it doesn't require player input to work efficiently. It's a type of weapon that makes you want to use it. It's not a weapon that you need to use.

This is the problem. The (manual) TML is a pure micro unit. It does not scale up. It does not work when you look away. The number of TMLs that you can spam now is the same number of TMLs that you can spam all game long. While it may have been effective at breaking specific installations, it was also just as easily shut down by point defense. It's the type of weapon that does NOT work well in AI hands, because it has a huge range of potential targets, at least one way to be nullified, and every single shot is costing you tanks.

Destroying stationary targets at range is the role of a long range specialist or artillery. Raiding is a job for raiders. Blowing away a heavy defense installation is a job for nukes. There are so many ways to get the damage done, and in ways that don't insult the scaling nature of the game. A manual TML is just bad.

Bobucles, so basically your argument is that 1) manual fire units have to be important, 2) TML's are not important, and thus 3) TML's should be merged with strategic missile defense and anti-experimental weaponry into a "general purpose kill gun"?

Would it not make more sense to simply have TML's that fire automatically? Which are still intercepted by missile defense? Why must a TML necessarily be manual fire?


In fact, I think there is a strong gameplay incentive to have tactical missiles be more commonplace than they are in SupCom/FA in order to make tactical missile defense more of a consistently-performing utility than a very effective shield against the possibility of being hit by a big missile. Heck, make regular missile defense work on a wide variety of missiles, giving some advantage to dumber, less precise shell weapons that kill enemies over time. Recast the TML to be more akin to a mobile missile launcher with more range, and have bigger, more expensive and powerful missiles with even more range be fired manually.

A bigger, more expensive manual-fire equivalent of a tactical missile might be classified as a cruise missile, intended to be used in conjunction with the massed-fire TML to cause a breakthrough in the missile defense at a target point. A cruise missile could be pretty much a guaranteed kill on most any single target, including large buildings, with something like continent-wide range. But it's still not a nuke.

A nuke would wipe out, or at least heavily damage everything in a huge radius, along the lines of the entire firing range of a little tactical missile launcher. And nukes cannot be stopped by tactical missile defense like common missiles or larger cruise missiles- you need strategic missile defense to stop nukes. But still, compared to a continent or planet's size, the nuke's blast doesn't bring it up to game-ending superweapon anymore.

A better solution to the binary antinuke defense issue is to tie the antinuke defense to your sensor grid, and make antinuke defense take TIME to take effect.

Like if you had a antinuke laser for example that sucked up lots of power - it can fire at any incoming nukes, but it takes 4 seconds for it to destroy the nuke, and it only fires at nukes on the radar. Or an antinuke missile launcher that fires a salvo of 4 missiles and then needs to reload - and it takes 3 missiles to knock out a nuke.

Suddenly you've got a scenario where your nuke launcher placement is more important (closer = less time to get shot down) and where the antinuke defense can be attacked from several different angles - block his sensors, attack from multiple locations, saturate his defenses with multiple nukes. And the defender gets a clear indicator on whether his nuke defense is adequate - if nukes are detonating at the edge of his base, his defenses may need beefing up.

And then you can add some neat units like a mobile nuke launcher.

There are a bunch of TMLs that already exist and fire manually. They're balanced as long range and siege specialists. They work because you pay lots of money for the platforms, and their missiles are FREE.

The manual TML is a cheap platform that costs money with each shot. While an AI can make pretty good choices on where to fire, it can not account for everything you want it to do. Players are going to find some kind of missile wasting abuse, so it's always going to waste money in ways you did not intend. That's very bad.

In fact, you can see this by playing against the Supcom cheating AI. One of its favorite things to do is throw endless waves of expensive TML missiles against you, forcing tons of missile defense. If you had to pay for every one of those missiles, you'd be broke! But having to tell every single tank-priced missile how to behave is worse.

Like, say... having anti air and point defense weapons shoot at a nuke as though it was some kind of flying experimental?

And then you can intercept it, or use an anti-experimental weapon to instantly kill it?

How about having automatically firing missiles that cost resources to fire? I really don't see what the issue here is- you are making lots of assumptions like "manual fire = costs resources, and automatic fire = free."

If tank-priced missiles are used so often and so casually that microing them is a problematic waste of a player's time, then simply make them automatic. Have a fire stance governing whether they hold fire or fire at will.

Didnt read through the entire thread, but I agree completely about reducing the scale of nukes. In Supcom, you never got really USE nukes very much, but you always had to be aware of them. I want to use them more cause they are fun, and cool, and very satisfying. If you can reduce the scale while still keeping that satisfaction where everybody, regardless of the team, stop and watches the nuke and is like 'cooool', that would be gold.

Id rather change the balance around them so they operated in between TMLs and supcom nukes - not the single unit micro required for TMLs, but also not the massive investment needed for a nuke.

I think a good way to balance the easier accessibility would be to frontload the cost of a stationary silo, paralleling the realworld cost involved in setting up a nuke program. Once this was complete, however, manufacturing them would be less expensive.

Whatever counter is employed wouldnt be frontloaded so hard, but could have a comparable expense per use, hopefully making the nuclear game less binary.

Not sure how things like mobile launchers should be done- ideally, the nukes themselves would need to be made at the dedicated 'nuclear facility', but that screams annoying at me.

Why don't we just have nukes handled like the proposed bomber ammo? This makes it an easily tuneable (for the devs) and easily controlled (for the users) value.

For the users, the decision to build an (expensive as suggested above) silo usually indicates dedication to the nuclear option. Using ammo-like mechanism helps prevent the annoying micro of setting a nuke to build when obviously that is what you want in that special purpose building! This also lets the user disable the silo, or multiple silos in order to prevent the mass/energy drain of building nukes when a spike in power demand (i.e. nuke defenses going off in response to an attack) necessitates it. Doing it in this fashion allows for the same mechanic being implemented now for bombers to be applied to nuke-capable platforms, like ballistic submarines.

However they do it, they had better make nukes leave a permanent crater. Not anything large, of course, but neither anything too small either. NUKES = CRATER, important! x4 to satisfaction level!
Setting nukes on automatic and dumbing them down in price sounds good. Getting to use nukes more is better since we will all have bigger fish to fry in making asteroids smash planets.
Just throwing some ideas out there but if nukes become cheaper, why not have the option of making a tier 2 nuke factory? Just as there will be tier 2 land, naval and air factories, how about tier 2 nukes? Perhaps a tier 2 nuke would have multiple re-entry vehicles (to counteract anti-nukes), emp (atmospheric detonation) nuke, a hyper-speed nuke (for destroying moving targets.
Another idea would be for them to roll out like units. Perhaps launch into the orbital layer and circle about to wait, or roll out on mobile trucks. Just throwing out some ideas to spur creativity!
Cuz we're looking for awesome!

Speaking of having nukes be auto-built..

One thing that I think would be neat is if you could launch nukes without selecting the building.. Having it choose the nearest silo with an available nuke to launch to that location. Would also make it easier to saturate an area with multiple launches (Queuing up the launch of available nukes and whatnot). Again, the idea of the silos in the Defcon games (which has been brought up) comes to mind in that regard. Odd as it may seem, something like this would probably go a long way towards making the nukes less of a game-ender.. In feel, at the very least.

The effect of these types of weapons shouldn't just be limited to when they're fired.
I've always thought that the cost of people building nukes (generally speaking in games) wasn't well balanced.

It would be nice if the cost of things - R&D, some building types - wasn't limited to just material or energy but included some form of risk - it's not rocket science un intended:

I was wondering as I skimmed this thread how a small chance of a mishap causing contamination, risk of explosions, etc - which would have a knock on effect on how & where people place things like silos or R&D centers - would effect game play.

Random effects wouldn't necessarily have to be restricted to things like nukes - a factory pushing out a batch of dancing cookie robots due to a bad firmware update would be pretty fun.

Thing is that PA are all robots. All technology has been condensed down to the best of the best. The best weapons, the best fighter patterns, the most efficient building parameters. There's nothing left to research because everything that is worth researching has been researched centuries ago.

I am now imagining a mod where instead of (proper) bullets, the robot armies wage war in the form of a dance-off.

As for the not rocket science bit.. There are a rather large quantity of little green men on a planet somewhere off on a far arm of the galaxy who had rockets before they had wheels. Take that how you will.
[[Yes, I'm referencing that game. ]]

Regarding shooting nukes down:

Conventional (IRL) nuke warheads require being triggered to explode. Damaging them does not set them off, so anything that can cause damage to the warhead can destroy a nuke. The only reason to limit defense to specific units or buildings (rather than letting aircraft or AA towers have a go) is one of gameplay balance.

Which is understandable, but does implement a binary (or trinary etc.) defense paradigm.

Bear in mind that ICBM or IPBM missile designs only need spend a tiny amount of time in the air layer, and can be (and normally are) sub or supra orbital units for most of the flight time. This will already minimise the amount of time air or static ground units can shoot at them, so the missiles don't have to be unfeasibly tough. It's also why missiles are used as the usual defense; anti-nuke missiles can meet the nukes at a high altitude level where conventional aircraft cannot.

If a high altitude flight path is implemented, I don't forsee too much issue with allowing anything to have a shot at nukes (as a unit), the same way in TA anything with enough ballistic height could have a shot at aircraft; Bertha's are highly unlikely to shoot a bomber down, even though they are perfectly capable of doing so, and AA defense and fighters are just as unlikely to take out a fast moving ICBM even if you let them try

Regarding scaling of nukes:

There's no reason to not have a variety of yield in the warhead, except in time to develop and gameplay balancing terms. I do like the (more realistic) idea of having a primary blast and secondary blast radius, assuming it's not too engine intensive to do. Difference in yield would simply scale the size of the blast radii.

Since we'll be getting the option of massively destructive KEWs in the shape of asteroids, and a possible KEW satellite, it's certainly feasible to rescale missiles as a less destructive option, and therefore less costly (since unit cost is usually tied to destructive potential). Treating them as units and allowing any unit to shoot at missiles, also means you already have SRM defense in the form of fighters and AA emplacements. ICBM and IPBM would only require specific defenses because they are too hard to hit with AA / Fighter cover (speed vs time in range, due to high altitude trajectory).

Regarding terrain deformation:

It would certainly be realistic to make high yield missiles (conventional or nuke) leave craters, but it does then allow for permanent resource denial via nuke strike. It would open up a lot of tactical options, including one where you deliberately nuke any resource point you can't or don't intend to hold, to deny it to your enemies.

Whether this is a good or a bad idea depends on your personal veiwpoint on turtling as a tactic, I think