My insight into nukes:

I played a game where I wiped out the enemy planet with a handful of nuclear weapons. This I believe sorta takes away from the game, but not to the extent that people think.

Pro:
-Get the job done fast
-Add's a new dynamic to the game
-Invading a planet becomes a lot easier

Con:
-Nuke-spam
-Cheap & fast

I believe that when the no-nuke option comes around I will play all my games with it, but nukes don't break the game! It is your own fault for letting your base get nuked. A good player will be two steps in front of his opponent and he will know when the enemies nukes are rolling out.

However I will play without nukes.

I will also play without nukes if they don't pretty much overhaul that system completely. It's a 17 year old dynamic that's so dead it's undead which is why it just doesn't seem to die. It really says something about your design when you can take 2 units out completely (nuke and anti-nuke) and the rest of the game is either unaffected or improved by the change.

Lol!

I would like to see the anti-nuke system overhauled more than the nukes themselves. If we could remove the tedium of building an anti-nuke every 50 ft and manually stocking it I think the nuke/anti-nuke play would be a lot more interesting.

Nukes are kind of unbalanced, or they are used as soft unit limit, ie. they end game when units get to around 500-1000. When you have good economy, around 100 fabbers can build nuke faster than old one takes to fly around half of planet. And there is small delay on antinukes, so same amount of fabbers cannot do antinuke in time others do nuke. Thats where nukes are unbalanced.

Just try it yourself, get huge eco going and start making nuke plus antinuke with same number of fabbers (around 100 or so), nukes always win.

I'm fine with nukes existing, but the thing that has always bothered me is it's the only thing in the game that has 1 and only 1 counter. It's a total non-decision - build this building all over your base or lose. It needs more counters.

Example 1 - Add an orbital unit that has no inventory and can snipe nukes passing beneath it.

Example 2 - Require an additional resource to enable launching nukes like a spotting/targeting satellite, which needs to be roughly near the area of impact to work.

I'm not saying the above are good solutions, just examples of adding more counters.

Anti-nuke launcher isn't really the most reliable counter there is to nukes. Got a comm and two ANLs? No problem, I'll drop 3 nukes.
The real counter is orbital control. Control orbital area and the enemy has no eyes onto you, can't hit you.
Either way, as one guy already pointed out, you can build a new nuke even before the first one lands. Maybe make nuke launchers unassistable?

If you are having a problem with nukes... you are not harassing your opponent enough, attack from every direction you can think of, scout repeatedly so you can see if they are getting nukes, t2 air or anything else...

also while I do favor nukes over T2 forces I still normally hold air and land control and condense my opponent into as small base as possible (limited eco) this not only means they have to build their own army to regain or keep expansions or they invest many resources in defenses like turrets so not only do I have good map control but I can also tech up while doing so and get a nuke before the other person however most games don't last long enough for me to nuke someone...

No, the problem is with the nuke defense.

We need that adjusted/fixed.

what exactly needs to be fixed about it?

A good player can easily counter or survive nukes.

They're only OP is you build all of your power within one nuke blast radius and don't build an anti-nuke.

Nukes are incredibly important in interplanetary warfare and I think people will change their tune about nukes when they're entrenched on one planet and their opponent is entrenched on another and they're having difficulty finishing the match.

This is where asteroid belts should be coming into play, not a boring ash economy race to build nukes.

Wouldn't it then become a "boring ash economy race to build" halleys? And it's a lot harder to recover from a planet smash than it is a nuke.

A good player can easily overwhelm your counters and crush you anyway. (As long as we're brashly overgeneralizing what a "good player" can do.)

But I think my generalization is easier to support than yours. It's simple math. The math is not "1 anti-nuke counters 1 nuke". The math is "1 nuke can hit in such a wide variety of areas that you need a many-to-one ratio of antinukes-to-nukes if you want to not get nuked". Your anti-nuke defends one small part of your base. My nuke can hit anywhere.

Cramming your base together helps protect it from attacks, including nukes, with the downside being if you DO get nuked, you lose it all. Spreading out makes nukes less efficient killers but also makes it harder for you to defend against them, or against anything else.

Plus, I would suggest that a good player does not need to nuke you to death to win. He just needs to nuke something useful, like your frontline defenses, so that his troops can push better, or your fledgling moon base, so he has time to invade. I can always find a good use for a nuke. I always regret not building them in any game where I try not to.

They are pretty much always worth building.

Which is super different from the nuke race... In fact, less boring because it involves traveling to different planets and there are a finite number of them

This is 100% true. And yet it's the main reason we don't have megabots. People like brian are the reason we are in such a hypocritical state IMO

I'm talking about two good players going against each other. And since you're using it as a straw man argument, let me rephrase.

If you play the game properly, nukes aren't insta-win. It's very possible to recover from getting nuked.

And no duh nukes can hit anywhere. They're supposed to. If there was a catch all to nukes, then nukes would have no validity in gameplay. They're supposed to be powerful.

The end goal is for astroids belts. Which would mean there would be more astroids than would be useable in most games.

So finite number isn't really a factor.

You know what I also regret not building when I don't build them? Advanced Factories. The only way to win is if you build advanced factories! So we should get rid of them.

Megabots are nothing like nukes.

Nukes are single use. You spend X metal, you get 1 explosion.

Megabots keep on destroying things until they're dead.

COMPLETELY different things. The two cannot be held to a direct comparison like what you're doing.

So "hypocrisy" is a 100% inaccurate word for this situation.

Btw, my words have absolutely no bearing on whether Uber does something or not. My words or actions have absolutely no bearing on whether Uber were to build megabots or not.

Speaking of straw-men, I have never seen anyone argue for a "catch all".

If anti-nukes were 3x cheaper, nukes would still be useful.
If anti-nukes grew legs and could walk around at the speed of a tank, nukes would still be useful.

The great thing with nukes is that even if you build an anti-nuke in exactly the spot I want to hit you, I still have numerous choices:
* Bomb/gunship your anti-nuke, then nuke you
* Invade with bots or vehicles just well enough to reach that anti-nuke and kill it, then nuke you
* Space lasers. Followed by nukes.
* Build 1 more nuke than you have anti-nukes at the location I want to hit. Then nuke you.
* Build nukes faster than you can build anti-nukes at that particular location. Then nuke you continuously until it works.

One of these tends to work.

Anti-nukes simply cost too much given how little they defend and how easy they are to destroy.

You kinda miss my main points.

Your main point seemed to be that nukes are not insta-win, which I don't think anyone disagrees with.

My main point is that anti-nukes are not cost effective, which leads to nukes being more powerful and more useful than they should be.