Insta-Exploding nukes

Smoke as far as the eye can see, occluding everything in its path. I dunno if you're aware of this igncom, but the bigger the blast the more debris, smoke and matter left in the atmosphere afterwards.

You know what would be lame? A nuke that behaves just like a smaller explosion.

I like this idea quite a bit. I think for futuristic warfare though simple smoke screens wouldn't be very effective. How about some kind of upper atmospheric missile launcher that disperses an electronic surveillance interference that blocks anything but direct visual from units in the effected area. I'm thinking a late game structure that takes awhile to build a missile and launches on demand and has a pretty good effect in either the area effected or the duration. This would give scouting units more of a purpose than I found them to ever be in SC.

Verisimilitude ranther than realism. When implementing a weapon that exists in reality in a game, it is sensible to make that weapon behave approximately the way people expect it to in order to enhance immersion. If that behaviour is harmful to gameplay, too expensive to simulate, or counter-intuitive in such a way that unrealistic behaviour actually seems right to people then you have reason to change it. Realism is making something act the way it does in reality - for nukes that would mean modelling the overpressure shockwave (assuming atmospheric detonation) plus thermal and gamma radiation pulses. Verisimilitude is making something behave in a way which is compatible with suspension of disbelief - for a nuke, that means a bright flash, a giant fireball, and a mushroom cloud.

This is just nonsense. If Uber want nukes to be more powerful than they were in supcom, they will be. If they don't, they won't. That's all there is to it. Do you really think they're just going to lift the numbers out of a previous game and drop them in without even considering the consequences of changes like the absence of shields?

If you wish to penalize the player for letting a nuke land, and this penalty is sight blockage, then reduce the LOS of units inside the cloud.

You do not block the player's UI. Or at the least, have an icon/cartographic mode that remains unblocked.

Why?

I don't know what Supcom you guys were playing, but I don't recall my UI getting nuked when my units are.

Yes. It is. It is more expensive to produce than other explosive munitions and should concordantly have greater impacts upon the receiving player.

Because they ARE another type of weapon. They are nuclear. This isn't complex igncom1.

You realise there is a scale dont you? you are oversimplifying everything into binary choices. We can have a balance between realism and fiction. If you want to take your logic and extend it in the other direction we can just have a spreadsheet feeding us totally unambiguous numbers instead of visuals. We aren't asking for a 100% realistic simulation. We are asking for a reasonable approximation that maintains the suspension of disbelief for a weapon that behaves in a way that most people intuitively understand and furthermore expect. Erastos explains it well.

You are extrapolating far and beyond what you could possibly assert with the limited information we currently have. This isnt SupCom without shields and it is simplistic to think about it that way. We have multiple planets, asteroids to throw at each other, and many other unique aspects of the game that have far greater potential balance issues than, "the nuke limits my view of the impact site for a few moments" good grief, get it in perspective. Erastos has it right again, It isn't like Uber are just going to drop any feature into the game without any attempt at balancing it.

I think I now understand igncom,
the 10s smoke is too much in comparison to the actual blast damage.

... easy solution: keep the smoke as it is and increase the blast damage and other direct hit effects by a factor of <pulls random number out of is hat> 10

to be serious (but redundant)
a nuke comes with a bag of expectations for the user as well the one its used on. Besides a big blast the smoke cloud is part of it. Arguing that smoke won't hinder robots in a future far far along won't work. Aside from the mentioned expectations, if you argue with the far future at some point you could argue away the kinetic and heat effects of a nuke ... doesn't help much.

aside from that, you can always take the smoke cover as a symbolic "you shall not pass" sign for a short cooldown period of the hit area.

Because the UI exists to deliver information to the player clearly and accurately. Not to limit the player's ability to see/do things.

It needs to convey the message of "a nuke has landed here" and not obscure the other information. Like "what bits of your base has survived".

I have no problem with nukes obscuring LOS, but the UI should reflect that LOS obscuration clearly, telling the player where his units are blinded and how much; most definitely not with a screen blocking effect that only the player (but not his units) cannot see through.

Don't quite understand how this post has gone on for so long!

From what it sounds like the OP wants a nuke similar to Red Alert 2. You select NUKE, click a square and it explodes dealing damage + an AoE. Then you continue playing.

What pretty much everyone else wants is a NUKE that deals damage, provides an AoE, and produces a realistic mushroom cloud (which has a side effect of blocking the players view of the landscape inside the play area).

If they implement this, the OP wants an option to turn on a 'Visible Mesh' for items behind visually blocked objects. Which, is pretty standard across the board anyway right?

So what are we discussing(arguing) about?

What the devs decide to do, is obviously beyond me.

Maybe if units had an outline around them when they went underneath the cloud, this problem can be solved. Though it should still affect LOS.



Also, off topic, but why does it seem that, whenever I reply, the thread I just posted in sinks to the depths of page 8 with no user input from then on? :roll:

It's called strat-zoom. Use it.

Boiled down, this is what I wanted.

But some people couldn't handle that it might spoil their bloody little cloud, and that's how it all escalated.

Frankly the people to blame are the ones who didn't want the UI to spoil their effects, I argued that really the effects were kinda pointless and people lost their shiz, apparently a nuke without the cloud is stupid and makes no sense, in a game with robots fighting in space.

But its all ok, along as we keep our emp smoke anti-radar anti-sight nukes right?

A weapon that can destroy an entire base was overrated anyway, it needed a buff.

Sarcasm and demeaning peoples opinion is no way to further your views. It tends to inflame a situation. Also you are pushing your opinion as though it is fact. Most of the opinions discussed on both sides of the fence have been implemented in prior games so they are equally valid. I'd have thought some discussion as well as alternative perspectives on the matter would be healthy, it shows if nothing else that people care about implementation of features for PA. Nobody is to "blame" for the length of the thread, it is that opinions do not line up and people have different visions for the implementation of nukes in the game.

I for one was most against your original recommendation of the TA implementation of nukes as you described in the first post, which wasn't a visual effect with underlying wireframe UI it was a second of the buildings blow up animation. Some evidence of the impact of a nuke should be visible past the time depicted in your example video. If not for the fact that yes, people do want some effects in their new RTS then think about some of the game-play impacts, after all you may be managing another theatre of war when it strikes and snapping back to see a hole in the base with no evidence of what hit it outside of "Oh it must have been a nuke" would be jarring, at least to me.

If people want a wire-frame UI under the visual effects for the nuke, that is another story, some people are still against this separate implementation, I am less strongly opposed to it but I do wonder if nukes should have more enhanced effects. As others mentioned above there is an opportunity to defend against nukes, if a player does not defend against nuclear attack then they should be inconvenienced in a different way to failing to defend against an attacking force of units. Nukes are resource and time heavy so other effects are worth discussing to see if we can come to an agreement on how that should be implemented. I would say that to suggest that units or the player would have no performance hit to their LoS or sensor range within the effects of a nuclear explosion would be very strange (I always thought it strange that anything should survive a nuclear strike anyway unless it were a hardened bunker of some kind).

Also please stop using straw man arguments, you keep taking things to extremes when it is clear that people are capable of thinking along a scale. The effects of a nuke can make sense in terms of a war with robots in space, people have listed various sensor types and reasons why they would be messed up. Explaining it away with "future tech" or the fact that some aspects of the game are not 100% realistic so we should do away with any scale of realism is absurd. Things are not binary choices so quit representing things as though they are.

For my 2 cents on the topic of "future sensors can see through nukes" it doesn't strike me that an efficient machine force is going to spend the resources behind making every unit's sensors impervious to the effects of a nuclear weapon on the off chance that it is hit by one AND survives it AND that being able too see through the nuclear fire at that moment would be the difference in turning the tide of a battle. Rather preventing the nuclear strike in the first place and pouring those resources into other avenues of war would make more sense.

I somehow doubt the mushroom cloud effect exists to purposely block the player's view of the battlefield, or that it's effect on gameplay were really taken into account. Indeed, I recall the units' strategic icons still being viewable.

But still. It's a god damn nuke. The enemy just punctured a giant hole in the most vital part of your base. You'd think the dust and smoke lingering for ten seconds would be the least of your concerns.

It's there to give a sense of immersion, and it just looks "awesome".

I am trying to do this for a pure gameplay stand point, but it seems that my point is worthless in face of the community.

As my last point to consider, While it costs resources and the lack of an enemy counter structure to successfully use nukes, SC tactical missiles worked on a similar basis.

and while I am not opposed to nukes being able to do what they do, I would still prefer that we consider the ability to wire map units and mass deposits that a behind terrain and effects for everything and not just nukes.

I don't understand what you say. And you still haven't replied to my post about smoke having a strategical importance.

Well once people complained about me responding to every poster, I guess I could only respond in general.

Saying the the GUI blocking smoke is an effect of the nuke weapon is like saying that we should support an EMP weapon that takes away the player's keyboard control so he has use the much slower order menu instead of hotkeys.
Both are weapons that restrict the usage of your GUI.

Smoke clouds blocking LOS is fine. Blocking LOS by obscuring GUI is not. Most especially not if the "LOS block" by GUI-obscuring smoke cloud isn't extended to the units below the cloud.

You do realize that the insta-destruction of the TA nuke was just because it was a massively upscaled version of one of their 2D explosion animations right?

The reason they didn't have sweet mushroom clouds and giant white flashes was because the graphics tech sucked back then. If they could've had SC nukes in TA you bet your *** they would've done.


Also

Can I just make a book of everything you say and sell it? Plox?