Yes, i know, they're shooting for awesome, not realistic. But this feature could be both! Nukes in RTS are usually indistinguishable from a powerful AoE spell, ie 'everything in this area takes a lot of damage'. It would be great if PA modeled them more realistically. Not down to the nitty gritty physics, but the basic string of effects should be there. 1) A blinding flash (well it shouldn't actually blind the player... or should it? Like a flashbang?) that does huge damage to anything in view, based on distance from ground zero. Units and buildings killed by this blast will be utterly annihilated - turned into dust, and you can't harvest their corpses. Anything damaged by it but not killed, will be set on fire, if that's possible (trees, maybe some units and buildings). 2) A massive shockwave. Again this is powerful enough to annihilate most units, and it has a larger AoE than the blast. It would be really cool if survivors were tossed away like ragdolls, although I'm not sure ragdoll effects will be in the game. 3) Radiation effects and fallout, but I dunno if this would have so much of an impact that it needs to be modelled. 4) EMP effects if you trigger an atmospheric blast over a world with a magnetic field, although this may be OP. 5) If solar power is in the game, Nuclear Winter. Each nuke will temporarily weaken the output of solar power on that planet. A dozen or so should throw up enough dust to blot out the sun entirely. This could be modelled exponentially so a single nuke has a very small effect.
Realistic nukes, when detonated near the surface, should perform like such: 1: Initial blast, immediate damage to everything in a wide area. 2: Shockwave: Immediately after the blast, pushes everything with mass away from the impact point. 3: Blowback: Shortly after the shockwave, this is a result of rapid decompression of cooling air... and it pulls matter back towards the detonation site. No radiation or fallout, these things only really affect people/animals, not robots. No nuclear winter, there is no scientific basis for expecting a nuclear winter to occur. EMP-blast only if detonated in the upper atmoshpere? Yes, that actually happens.
It would even make more sense if Robots in a Robot-War uses Nuclear weapons to generate EMP`s, instead of direct blasts. The thermal shockwave itself has mostly no effect agains a mashine, and only the superheated plasma at the center of the detonation would have a real effect on there warmashine. I would imagine thats the reason why Robots did utilize asteroids as a weapon of mass destruction. You can get a far bigger detonation yield out of a asteroid with a drive then a nuke. And Nuclearwinter depends on the yield of the warhead. To create a real nuclear winter you would need many Atomic Weapons that got a high blast yield, in the 2 digit megaton area, to blow the dust and vaporized material high enough into the stratosphere. Theoreticel. But there is no real reason to doubt the theory, couse its quit logical. In the Stratosphere the dust and vapor would stay a long time, block sunlike and would come down to earth very slow. (couse in that layer there isnt mutch wind, atmosphere or water to create a rain-down effect after sutch a blast known as "Fallout") So in order to get a real nuclear winter you would have to detonate more then 40 BIG nukes and they would have to detonate at areas where they can suck in mutch dust and vaporized material to blow it into the sky. But a asteroid impact, If it is big enough and the Planet survives, would create a nuclear winter. I have to think here at the game Earth 2150. They managed it in E2150 to build the weather influences into the economics, like the Moon girls with there solar-collectors. They created more and more energy as closer the Planet Earth drifted to the sun. Well i...drift from the topic, i guess. A Real Nuclear feeling, well... its a nice touche, but not a neccessary need here, couse like Funkoff stated, we fight a Robotwar. But as a sitenote, i would be tottaly for a manual detonation button or a tactical detonater so the nuke would always detonate, even if it got intercepted and create a nice EMP effect under it. :>
Erm... you do understand that big nukes actually are able to create a shockwave that can blast away literally everything within the blink of an eye? A small robot that weights maybe a few tons has no chance of beeing unaffected.
And? If he is a evil warmashine that is builded quit well he will stand up and walk back into battle! :> And it also depends how dense the atmosphere of the Planet is.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PbZnZy1 ... page#t=14s nothing should by able to withstand something like this. The only thing left after such an explosion will be unidentifiable rubble. Doesnt matter what kind of armor your robot has.
Dude thats a TZAR, if we get this nukes regulary i say yes you are right! Thats the biggest and deadlyst nuke ever created. But the biggest nukes i saw in SupCom or TA wasnt more then 1-2 Megaton area. More like in the Tactical yield scale, 50 to 500 kilotons. If you drop a Tzar in SupCom1 and wanna do it with the detonation yield it has, you would incinerate the whole BlackSun Island with 1 strike.
Even such a "small" nuke is definitely enough to crash any kind of 10 to 50 meters big robot into very tiny pieces. What would be the point of shooting a nuke, if you know any normal enemy unit will withstand it. I mean ... really look at SupCom1, those nukes create blasts far bigger than any unit. Sure they dont have the area of effect as the tsar, but if they had, they were pointless gameplay-wise. Thats just a limitation by gameplay, you cant have a nuke blasts up the whole map, that would always draw the game. That limitation on the aoe could actually be removed in PA, since it is about destroying whole planets anyway. A normal Tank should be destroyed by nukes, as should normal buildings. And since PA seems not to plan for lots of big XP-Units and instead will go with lots of rather small units, basically all units in PA will probably be shredded by nukes. Anyway, who actually needs nukes? We get Asteroids, even PLANETS to throw at each other. Thats way more effective anyway
I support having tactical and 'large' nukes, as well as EMP-specific weapons (tactical and large). In fact, if I recall, that's what TA had?
I was debating whether I should make a post about this, when you launch a nuke, you have the option to launch at the ground or an airburst
Hmmm... a Robot that big and that has a gyrostabilise system could keep standing, i guess, agains the shockwave of a tactical nuke. But thats my Mechwarrior Experience talkin there... you needed rlly massiv kinetic damage in front to get a Mech from it´s feets. And still, the shockwave depends on the Atmosphere. On a Moon as example a Nuclear weapon would not be that effectiv. Well the easyst way would be the "Golden Eye" Sattelite. xD Put a Nuke into a Low-Orbit Sattelite, and over the targetarea, detonate it! I mean SupCom1 had also a kind of EMP Effect, but in SupCom1 the Nukes you launched wasnt fitted with a real tactical detonater (bomb detonates as soon the missile is damaged, even in midfly) or a remote detonate button. The Cybrans had Ionic Bombs i assume, they did created massiv EMP fields that damaged and stuned all in radius. But Cola thats excatly what i wrote! Who needs nukes, you need many of them to kill a mashine race! Just throw asteroids at them! That will teach them to lay claim on a world that my own Controller wants! Ehm...damn wrong game.
