What if Nukes Weren't Superweapons?

Potentially worse is making it part of the orbital layer. There's no telling how difficult orbital units are to reach, and if it's too difficult then the soft solution is kind of pointless.

Ground units aren't going to be a very good answer, but they can help while staying mostly out of explosive range. Typically, if you control more terrain than the opponent, you'll have a better ability to intercept nukes.

This mostly depends on the scale between the weapons. If there isn't enough difference, I suppose they could melt together into a single unit. This is how I see the two weapons compared:

Improved SMD
Stationary.
Roughly SMD cost per attack.
Medium to long range. (at least from one ally to another on Seton's, at most within reach of both frontal positions)
Tracking.
100% unblockable (or at least very few real ways of avoiding it)
Anti-orbital?
Super fatal, do not explode, do not pass GO, do not collect 200 metal.
Unusually small radius, or no splash at all.

TML
Potentially mobile.
Roughly tank-cost per attack.
Direct fire, non seeking. (thus poor effective range against nukes)
Medium to extreme range.
Can be shot down by missile defense.
Moderate to heavy damage, with a chance of splash.

I'm not a big fan of TMLs, to be honest. They almost seem like too small a weapon to justify manual, individual control from the user. In TotalA and Supcom2, the long range missile weapons pretty much took care of themselves. In Supcom2, the Illuminate TML was simply a different flavor of light artillery, which pretty much captures their purpose from Supcom1.

But hey, if the weapon can take the shot, then go nuts.

To be fair, the nuke in this case is also working as an anti-air unit, thanks to its death explosion. There's also no law against launching more nukes, from different angles, because don't forget that planets are round!

Generally, if you are trumped economically then a nuke isn't going to turn anything around.

Yeah, that's an issue. It partially helps to attack perimeter areas. Any nuke that gets close is already partially successful. If the blast has some momentum, then it's still a good hit. Like a falling plane, except nuclear.

For really thick air defenses, there are other avenues of attack. Ground units, artillery weapons, tactical missiles (which in this case are not air units), expanding for more money, and attacking directly from orbit(unblockable weapons might include beam satellites). Or asteroids. There's always asteroids.

Nukes may be really powerful, but the extra difficulty in using them would make it one of the weaker doomsday weapons.

Your idea of a weapon that is completely devastating against one target, with zero splash (effectively gibbing practically anything) is actually a cool idea for a new type of superweapon. But it doesn't belong on the antinuke.

Some type of black hole weapon? Creates a tiny black hole instantly at a target location within range, and swallows the target (or does INCREDIBLE damage at any rate)- its a good, novel, interesting idea. It's a different take on precision artillery, and makes sense as a superweapon version of precision artillery- or perhaps snipers. It's a sniper superweapon. Deserving of high cost due to its great power, and obviously being useful for killing huge units, and for killing commanders. Perfectly accurate, absolutely lethal. There is no defense, there are no countermeasures. Every time this weapon fires, one of their units dies. However the actual number of casualties inflicted by such a weapon is rather low compared to huge area-of-effect weapons, including nukes, KEW's, antimatter weapons, and other more conventional doomsday weaponry.


TML and your proposed weapon-SMD are not fundamentally that different. The range, the damage, the cost to fire, whether it is tracking or not (it should probably track) are all negotiable.

From a player choice perspective, merging the two also raises the interesting tension of using the same missiles for both offensive and defensive purposes. If you fire all your missiles to kill stuff, you won't have any left to intercept an enemy nuke until you build more.

While I agree that ground attack, bombardment, expanding, etc. are all definitely options if there is heavy air defense, the canonical hard counter to ze uberturtle has been to snipe their antinuke, and then nuke the CRAP out of him, since nukes don't care about turrets, anti-air, defending units, etc. while an army certainly does.

Actually, now that I think about it, that black hole weapon would effectively be an anti-antinuke, since it is an uncounterable kill on an enemy antinuke. How about that as an idea?

I like the direction you're going with this. Nukes aren't a big deal, not compared to KEWs.

I think the use of air against nukes is just a bad idea. it more or less forces people to have large amounts of air.

Making it part of the orbital layer? maybe. the cost of a sattelite is mostly it's launch cost. sattelites themselves are pretty cheap. Fitting one with a laser should work fine. (note: in orbit, about half the world can see and shoot you, and any longer range missile can hit you).

I agree with the gameplay potential of more common nukes but I'm even more into the aesthetics of it. IIRC in the original "space marine in powered armor" fiction, Starship Troopers, their main weapon was an auto grenade launcher that shot mininukes. Yet in all these "badass" space marine games they use rifles and pistols, WTF? I just squirm with glee at the thought of a future battlefield with tactical nukes as common as artillery shells are now. Perhaps there could be three levels of nukes - mininukes, fired by normal units without having to build each one; tactical nukes; and strategic nukes. And then of course KEWs in the role of the SupCom 'nuke'.

I also like the idea of a beam that kills whatever you aim at. Sounds a lot like an upgraded D-gun. If the D-Gun name is unavailable they could call the commander's weapon the A-Gun or Annihilation Gun, and this "stationary D-Gun plus" superweapon could be the Annihilation Cannon. It sounds OP but could be balanced by having to use line of sight. So unlike with artillery or missiles you can't hit anything beyond the horizon, and have to build it on a moon to get the enemy on the other side of the planet.

1) Throw more nukes at it. Any defense can be overwhelmed.
2) The canonical hard counter has been upgraded to gigantic asteroids. Nukes are small fish in a big sea.

It is standard in games that a dead unit leaves a stationary explosion. But that doesn't make much sense for nukes, since its explosive material is a real substance with mass and burn time. If the nuke blows up, why not keep the explosion moving? A stationary air defense won't be very effective at stopping a nuke pointing directly at it, because you stopped the nuke and now it's raining fire.

The counter is working both ways. The nuke is clearing out air units, and the air units are clearing out nukes. It's probably more effective to score the kill with ground units, since there would be far fewer casualties.

Sticking nukes on the orbital layer is an option. But then you're depending on heavily investing in the highest tech level to deal with a relatively inexpensive threat, getting rid of the "easy answer" to nukes. It could go either way, but it should definitely be tested as air and space units to see what works best.

In terms of general balance, the easier it is to stop a nuke, the cheaper it can be. As an air unit it can be plenty easy to stop, and plenty cheap to use. An orbital unit creates a more expensive nuke that has fewer ways to be stopped, bringing nukes closer towards their original "all or nothing" unit.

I don't like the idea of a gib gun reaching between land bases. Why?

- It snipes nuke launchers, anti-nukes, heavy artillery, and pretty much every big project ever.
- It snipes itself. The first player to get one up can shut down all others.

That sort of power demands a much more expensive (and maybe orbital) gun, so while it's a great nuke pad killer it is no longer acting as an efficient nuke defense.

The middling range is to keep it more in a defensive, land-holding role. The kind of range that the Supcom TML had.

True enough. They're so similar that you could remove one from the game without changing any real options. Which one would you rather keep? I think we're going to see missiles all over the place, so a slightly bigger missile launcher is kind of "ehh more of the same".

Well. There is one countermeasure. A cloaked unit can't be targeted. Otherwise you'd just be cheating!

WHAT?

I am not sure what you are suggesting here. If everything uses nukes, you either have VERY short games or you scale nukes to the planet and they're just regular weapons...

god no

I don't see the problem with the current set up.

If anything the current nuke defense once set up is impenetrable to even 2 or 3 nukes (Unless it's SC" where a SMD can counter over 6 nukes at once.)

So if nukes become more affordable, then so will SMD, and the inclusion of SMD in the orbital layer and others simply just makes nukes even more of a waste of money.

Essentially you will never have to worry about them because the amount you will need to get through would mean you have already won or have no defenses to appropriately defend yourself.

Well not everything. Mininukes could be a certain unit's normal attack, maybe some kind of Atomic Annie knockoff. Of course this would have to be a pretty expensive unit and the blast radius/damage would indeed be smaller than a normal nuke but bigger than normal artillery.

I honestly think the idea of anti-nuke weapons should have varying degrees of success is a good way to go.

Anti-air weapons, fast aircraft, or certain orbital weapons could kill nukes in flight, but they would have a risk of setting the nuke off. This detonation would be to a lesser degree compared if the nuke was to hit the main target. Losing a group of aircraft would be annoying, but it could help with getting SMD's up for future nukes and/or save SMD ammo.

AA would be for smaller bases but is the worst of all the anti-nuke options and would have a very high chance to fail in taking out the nuke and even when it does it would damage the base. If this sounds too odd, I think the option for a specialized weapon for nukes but with a very small area of effect could cover this, such as the smaller energy weapons that has been mentioned.

Orbital weapons would just have to be placed strategically or you have to lucky in the positioning when taking out a nuke mid-flight. These early game options would give counter-play for players before they can get SMD's and for players struggling to even afford them.

However SMD's would be the best and most successful option, but would cost more than the others. Be it missile based or larger energy weapon based this group would be more consistent in taking out nukes and preventing the nuke from going off before hitting the main target or in flight and causing collateral damage.

If nukes are to be cheaper and more common there needs to be more options to take them out, but not all of them need to be hard-counters, rather soft-counters. Just throwing in my thoughts on this topic.

the problem is the digital nature of nukes. You have nukes but the enemy has no defence? you win. Enemy has defence? nukes are a waste of resources.

In TA, as mentioned a dozen times before me, nukes were less effective. powerful, yes. but not a game decider.

This btw was even worse in Supcom 2.


Nukes should be useable. I believe a nuke and MIRV-style nuke are very viable tactics. I think allowing nukes to be targeted is a good idea. I think anti-nuke sats are a good idea (again: arty can shoot around the world. Sats probably will not have a very long life expectancy). But i think that they should not become a blatant excuse to more or less force people to build air.


Again: i do not see why an anti-nuke weapon would not also be a generic anti-missile weapon.

That would be awesome. Smashing a planet into another? Yes! Yes Yes Yes. Though it ought to be a one shot kinda thing. Last resort maybe?

Regardless of whatever else, it would be awesome to check out in-game.
I want to blow up planets.

Indeed.

A direct hit could kill a commander but generally the AOE wasn't that great enough for it to be a massively powerful weapon.

As I said in my quite.

The problem with adding in more counters is that it become much easier to kill nukes.

Meaning that they need to become more frequent.

So yeah, more counters? More missiles.

Depends on the size, a Gatling gun will take a lot of time to shoot down a full sized ICBM where as compared to a more expensive missile (In sup com it was more or less an actual tactical missiles.....tactical missiles shooting down strategic missiles.)

Look at American patriot missiles, not the best SMD but it involves firing a kinda cruse missiles at an ICBM as to the best of my understanding.

More powerful also works. There's nothing wrong with dealing extreme damage on a completely unblocked nuke. However, the basic expectation is that the nuke is partially blocked, not dealing its full damage.

In terms of real life physics? There isn't much difference, to be honest. Our missiles and nukes are not very different in terms of size or delivery system. In terms of gameplay? It's all the difference in the world. The major point of SMD is that nuke defense isn't free. Generic missile defenses tend to be free, or at least dirt cheap.

Nukes are OHKO base killing weapons. Generic missiles are very minor damage weapons.
The difference in scale is orders of magnitude. A missile defense that excels at shooting down dozens of tiny specks is not built with the same scale of firepower needed to shoot down a giant *** bomb. There's nothing wrong with it trying, but it probably won't end well.

I don't think I offered any way to make nuke defense free. The intent is that there are different ways of paying the price to defend or mitigate a nuke.

Problem with nukes - They are either insanely strong or insanely weak
Reason they should stay - They are awesome

More powerful doesn't change anything, because if the nuke can't get to target, then it can't do anything.
(And I don't see how a nuke would be partially blocked, shooting at the carrying missile won't do anything to the warhead, and damaging the warhead would totally prevent the ting from working at all.)

Cybran tactical missiles split into 3 (Overall less damage) missiles when shot at, we could implement something similar.

The thing is that nukes as we know them are tiny and insignificant compared to the amount of force that is involved in a large asteroid strike like we will have available to us in the game.

So yes, I agree. Nerf nukes into the ground. Make them ordinary explosions. They don't cause big massive craters (maybe little craters), they don't knock planets out of their orbits, they just aren't as powerful as a meteor strike. Nor should they be.

In the context of futuristic battle hardened robots, maybe nukes just aren't that big a deal. Sure you might push a bit of dirt around and knock over a few trees, and maybe even dent up a few robots or structures. But to keep things in perspective, even if you scale up the nukes to be more appropriate as a weapon of futuristic robots, you're still talking about an explosion many orders of magnitude smaller than the real big boys of PA. and by the big boys, I mean Meteors.

Meteors are the new nukes guys. Get used to it.

Nerf nukes so they are like predator missiles in Starcraft?
No.
Keep nukes.
They are awesome.

Partially blocked- you shoot it a lot and it explodes, likely not in the way it was supposed to. Units/defenses involved in the interception enjoy a brief victorycandescence.

Why would it not explode? The warhead could very well be an antimatter payload, a macguffin, or anything else. Or the damn thing just goes off when its hull gets critical. It can't be a soft counter if the nuke doesn't explode!

I think it bears repeating that making nukes cheaper and non-superweapons isn't a nerf. In fact, I for one suspect it constitutes a colossal buff. They become actually usable with some frequency, and a more commonplace type of asset like artillery or anti-air, but fewer in number than very common units. A small nuke store would be excellent support for an army, giving you very powerful options when fighting large enemy forces. However a huge nuke stockpile in one threatre that eats into your main military strength there would be relatively weak.

Envision it like this. The same relation exists between bases, armies, nukes etc. For a small war between two bases, a single nuke is huge. It wipes out the entire enemy base, kills an entire army, etc. An entire TA or SupCom skirmish game would essentially be a single local battle for a region on a single planet. On that scale, a single nuke would wipe out the entire enemy base, and win the local war. Nukes should still have the same effect as in TA or SupCom, but an entire match in those games is basically two bases fighting over a region.

In PA, there is another layer above that scale, where there is an entire planet being fought over. And winning one region, possibly with a nuke, doesn't decide the entire war on the planet.

And at a scale level yet above even that, there are multiple planets in PA. And planet killing weapons let you wipe out an entire planet, but still don't necessarily decide the entire game. Planet killers have a HUGE effect, at great cost- more analogous to nukes in TA or SupCom which can practically decide the entire game by wiping out someone's main base- only you are doing it to their most developed planet instead of their most developed base.