I had an anti-nuke right next to an advanced factory. My opponents landed a nuke just outside the radius of effect for the anti-nuke launcher and still managed to destroy the advanced factory. That doesn't feel right to me, because in effect the anti-nuke launcher is only protecting itself or shooting down nukes that fly overhead. I think a 50% increase in the area of effect would be nice in order to guarantee the survival of costly structures.
First off, great pic, Loved Dragon Mountain, good ol' 2nd Ed D&D ok to your post....I could see a slight increase but not 50%, when talking about radius that is a massive upgrade, also, you should have your nuke launchers farther out, towards the forward line of your base along with any point defense and then a few here and there inside for extra defense, just for that, if it flies overhead, it gets shot down. If I am sending a nuke, I first look to hit the forward point defense of that base with the nuke to create a path for my tanks / bots, as most of the time people do what you did, a few anti nukes in the middle, and only point defense (or most of them, around the outsides)
I to kind of want to jump on the band wagon of increasing the coverage of the anti nuke. but at the same time, i've only been cheated by it once and don't want to sound like a cry baby. I do wish the time at which nukes take place in the game don't immediately start at the beginning of (advanced) Tier class.. The game I was in involved, 1 nuke pretty much destroyed my teammate's main orbital factory and engineers... rendering his build capacity significantly lower. Regardless of building an anti nuke and anti nuke launchers, it is much faster to build a nuke and send it over then spend 3x the effort of building anti nukes around the base to prevent destruction. But to stay on topic, Anti nuke range could use a bit of a buff. I understand it shouldn't nullify nukes on half the planet, but at the same time barely cover which that you want to protect.
It's really the cost that makes the anti-nuke such a bother to use. You either have it and the nuke does absolutely nothing, or you don't and you get hit. The binary nature of this interaction just bores me. In the late game there's never a situation where nukes aren't useful, especially if they will be used between planets in the future. Now maybe it would be a little more interesting if building a nuke in progress would turn it volatile, where even a minor amount of damage would make it blow up just as if it were launched at the enemy. You either protect it heavily at the cost of having loads of structures around it that can be potentially destroyed, or you don't protect it at all, but it doesn't have much of a chance hitting anything.
I agree, not to mention you can have up to three ready to go, but if the enemy is dumb enough or has at least 4 nuke sites aimed in a super condensed area, it seems like it will rarely be effective counter measure. I currently don't even bother because in larger games, it would just take long to cover your whole base in these guys and stock them up.
Given that its rather easy to snipe individual buildings (thus sniping anti-nuke and then nuking) buffing the anti-nuke building to a huge cover wouldn't hurt the flow of the game much. It would prevent building the nuke to be always worth it (if you can spare the temporary reduction in your economy it causes and most mid-level games can do that) which is imo a better design then something that you can always build savely in the knowledge it will be useful and thus has limited strategy behind it.
Not sure if you guys are aware, but if you build the anti-nuke at the 'front' of your base, or the part at which the nuke would have to fly over to reach the rest of your base, it will shoot the missile down. That is to say it will shoot down nukes flying over the area and not just targeting a building/unit within its area of coverage. So if setup correctly, you could cover quite a large area of your base with one anti-nuke.
I'm ok with having to put the anti-nuke on the side of your base closest to your opponent, but if you have more than one opponent (and many games are FFA and so do), then that means that with one nuke launcher you have the potential to target anyone, but with an anti-nuke you only have the potential to defend from one person. In a 4 way FFA, that means to protect yourself you'd need 4 anti-nukes to be safe, but in order to attack anyone you'd only need one nuke launcher. When such situations occur, to my mind that suggests an imbalance.
This is true because you can only tell a nuke where to go not where to fly like units. On the other hand if your base is on the opposite of the planet compared to the enemy's, then you won't have that advantage at all. And you can always build a nuke at that opposite side of the planet.
I think that is a little counter intuitive of an anti nuke scheme to where you build the anti nuke launcher towards the opponent that has the nuke. Nukes can be built anywhere and strike at any direction, and the point that Firedrakex is trying to make is that the current range doesn't seem to effectively protect the buildings that surround the anti nuke launcher. So even if the nuke launcher guy hits outside the range of his anti nuke(lets say in front[Front Lines]) he is going to do some credible damage to the buildings that are inside this range. Also, exposing your anti nuke launcher to the front of a battle field is opening up for it to be taken down more conventionally. I've done some testing to figure out how much damage a nuke does to buildings that are in the protected circle of the anti nuke launcher. It seems that there is quite a bit of damage that is close to the anti nuke launcher itself. Adding a rough 50% increase to range shows that it does seem to protect a modest amount more of structures from a nuke strike, and I deem favorable but its just a matter of opinion.
I agree that radius should be larger. Ideally the interface should overly two circles: Red circle = radius of interception Green circle = radius of interception minus blast radius of a nuke at the edge of the red circle (green shows what areas are fully protected) Presently the green circle would pretty much just surround the nuke launcher itself (if that), which is a bit silly.
Why are we not considering different anti-nuke buildings? What would be wrong with an AN building that costs slightly more than 1/3 of the current one, same radius of defence, and same build time and cost on the missile; BUT only one missile at a time? It means that when you're outplayed, your opponent can always send more than one nuke in to take you out. Making it a little less cost-effective means that the current 3-missile AN will be more attractive once your economy reaches a certain stage. Because we're playing on spheres and not flat maps, some unit or building types just don't transition well to spherical play. Most of the older flat maps would have people starting in the corners, or on an edge. Even in the case where you weren't, starting positions were still done in such a way that your opponents would be within a certain arc with respect to your base (at least early game). Because we can't back up against the edge of a map and a nuke can come from any direction, some buildings are going to need to evolve past their original design constraints to accommodate play on spheres. I feel a nuke should be a base leveller, but the game feels as though whoever races to nukes (while still keeping up some persistent harassment with other units) will win. Yes it's beta, but as other people have said at the moment, nukes feel very 'binary'. Hell, perhaps even make nukes only intercept-able in flight, and not once they make their final terminal dive.
I'd like to see nukes require satellite targeting to fire beyond a certain radius - that would space them out a little more reasonably as far as the tech tree goes, I'd think, and make it a parallel option to orbital rather than a way to win without it.
Actually maybe what we need are anti-nuke buildings that work with "energy as ammunition", like bombers. Rather than queuing up the building and then queuing up the missiles and then assigning workers to help build the missiles, maybe it should be more like: The anti-nuke building, once built, automatically recharges at a rate of 1 shot every 15 seconds. It can store up to 3 shots. This is all automated. So 1 anti-nuke is absolute proof against 1 nuke (unless you have enough build assist on the nuke to build 1 nuke every 14 seconds, anyway) and does not require anything other than to be built. I feel like part of the problem now is that anti-nukes require as much micro overhead to build and maintain as nukes, but they aren't as generally useful. (Plenty of times I've nuked someone because they built anti-nuke silos but either forgot to start the missiles or didn't leave anything assisting it so the missiles took too long to build.)
