What if Nukes Weren't Superweapons?

But isn't that awesome? what are the chances that the one nuke you fire, hits the commander?

In TA, nukes were powerful, effective but not game-ending.

I would very much like to see this in PA: it makes sense to defend against nukes, but one getting through is not the end. a big blow, yes. your enemy will be jumping up in their chair as the nuke hits. you feel sad. But it's not the end of the battle.


IMO, an ICBM style nuke could work too, as an alternative. lower damage intensity (so a commander would not be one-hit KO) but destroying a larger area. Maybe buildings (or vunerable buildings) should be able to hunker to better defend against this.

Nukes should be one hit KO against most stuff, but their insane effect in the Supcom series was just too much. (i won a match in a 3v3 by nuke-rushing in Supcom 2. it just wins you the match. all it took was 4 nukes, one per player and one on their central defence.)

Indeed, and I also still want the nuke to be capable of killing a commander.

Yep, frankly I want a system like what SC2 used where nukes could kill commanders but with the right upgrades the commander could hunker itself to survive the blast but at the cost of actually doing anything.

The amount of times I have activated this ability just before a nuke hits. It gets the blood flowing.

an ICBM is just a Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (Inter-Commander Blast Missile). If your not dropping it from a plane, this is what your moving your nukes with.

But yes, a variant or even a number of variants of nukes would be awesome.

Suffice to say SupCom 2 is completely FUBAR in most respects. Having antinuke be locked deep in the research tree is just one of its many ridiculously obvious design mistakes.

And please, don't even think about having Hunker in PA. If you really want an ability to shelter your commander from nuclear strikes or other attacks, build him a bunker. A very tough structure intended to shelter squishy units from serious punishment, such as artillery, air strikes, missiles, nukes, etc. would be a quite reasonable addition to PA. A commander inside would be well protected, and cannot do anything. Pretty much the same gameplay effects as Hunker, without being unlockable, and without being manually cast. Because both those things are terrible.

I also think that nukes should be capable of killing commanders with direct hits, or at least quite near hits. However blind-firing a nuke into a base where you suspect the commander is in the general vicinity shouldn't cut the mustard. As I stated earlier, having an inner "kill-anything" radius, with an extremely large relatively low damage outer radius fulfills this design goal. A near hit kills the commander. A distant hit in the general area hurts, but won't instantly kill the commander or other big units or structures.

In the game it works fine but thats not the point, and was not what I am suggesting.

Like other commander upgrades, you would take time and resources to upgrade your commander with it.

And I see no problem with using it as an ability, overcharge was an ability, as was the d-gun and cloak.

We are talking about the same Supcom2? In the one I played, all upgrades were instant and required no additional resources beyond the Research Points.

Mike

Yeah, but that was my suggestion for PA.

I know how SupCom2 works silly

That seems like a handy early game solution. It's a nice protection against things like a gunship rush or surprise artillery. For example, a bunker worth 1 factory might provide a layer of protection that doubles your Comm's HP, and maybe gives some repair. But nukes? Late game stuff? That's really pushing it.

The best way to avoid a nuke is to pull a 360 and walk away.

In fact, just about every defensive option a Commander could ever possibly need has been covered in this other thread. It has early game, mid game, and late game all wrapped up into one package.

Just like to point out that you're still going in the same direction with a 360... think you meant 180

Let me just say a few things using real world nukes as reference.
1. Our nukes are fully capable to work in space given specified program even without much of additional fuel. And because they use starmaps as coordination system, they can attack any place in our star system, where the stars are seen, calculating the coordinates.
2. Most of the nukes do have splitting warheads as means of overwhelming SMD's. That's why SMD's are nukes(though smaller) as well - to catch all the warheads in EMP blast frying 'em for good.
3. Given the scale of nukes we don't need to nerf 'em nor make 'em cheaper. We can just give 'em new mode - high altitude blast. It has more radius(spheric radius of EMP, to be exact), it fries everything in it(except, maybe, commander, which can be shielded enough, but would be temporarily shut down instead due to damaged peripherals), and leaves all the mass not operational, but still there to collect, as opposed to normal nukes(That, of course, is a disadvantage, which makes player to still use low-altitude nukes to destroy experimentals, for example).

Yup, different kinds of nukes would be interesting.

And here's one more thing I forgot. About Kuzkina mat. There is a special features that this bomb has at 75% of power onwards.
1. It increases tectonic activity on the whole continent significantly and slightly on the whole planet except the Fire Belt, which is very sensitive for seismic changes. So it creates earthquakes and volcano eruptions as an aftereffect. It becomes really visible after critical level of explosion power.
2. It shifts the planet's orbit. No, it really does. nd as teaser shows, nukes would be used to stop the KEW.

1: i agree Hunker should be manual. Again: the chances that you hit the commander with a nuke are REALLY low. if the enemy paid no attentioN: his fault.

2: i meant MIRV, not ICBM. my fault. Ordinary nuke: firepower. MIRV: carpet nuking. Nuclear defence: Anti-nuke missile for long range and Laser for short (especially against MIRVS?)

Looks like you know nothing about nuclear weaponry. The antinuke is a nuclear rocket made to fry all the warheads before they find the target and move to the final trajectory.
If you try and use a laser, you'll get a high-altitude explosion. On the altitude where antinukes work(close to the ionosphere where nukes are almost undetectable) the explosion does almost nothing but on the altitude where laser actually can work with enough accuracy the explosion will fry the laser station.

I don't think you are quite correct.

Man, I live in few kilometers from nuclear weaponry facilities. My teachers always shown documentaries about nuclear weaponry. My final exam in technical school was supervised by nuclear rocket navigation system developer. Of course I know what I'm talking about compared to any normal citizen(especially US citizen), though, of course, inferior to developers themselves.

That 'experience' doesn't mean anything, I live in kent but that doesn't mean I know how to pilot a spitfire, build a castle, dig a tunnel under the Chanel or grow a garden.

My point is that a laser or any weapon really can safely destroy a nuclear weapon because shooting at a nuke doesn't activate it, not because an anti-nuke weapon can 'fry' the weapons targeting computer.

The only limitations in interspersion is detection (Radar in SupCom and TA can pick up nukes) and accuracy (Making missiles and lasers a much better choice).

As I said, the nuke isn't that difficult to activate. Nuke defence works not because it prevents nuke from going off, but because it prevents nuke from reaching the target baking it up there, where that kind of particle radiations isn't uncommon at all.
The lasers with it's pinpoint accuracy and targeting problems can't provide this in required range, so use of antinuke missiles is required.
In case you didn't understand, frying the missile computer makes all of its circuits overload, in most cases activating the detonator. The same event renders the engine useless and makes it explode, but not before the nuke itself explodes in even more powerful explosion.
Even if you make the activating sequence very complicated, the chance of engine explosion detonating the nuke is not that small.

And of course you didn't learn to

, so your argument is not valid.

But why shouldn't the nuke blow up? It could very well be an antimatter implosion bomb. You can't stop that by exposing it to PROTONS.

In TotalA, the nuke defense did not negate the nuke. It simply destroyed the weapon far away from home. Negating nuclear weapons is a trait that started in Supcom, which is where nuke problems really started.

Oh boy, all this talk of realism in a game where you can put rockets on an asteroid and ram it into a planet.

Why exactly shouldn't there be an anti-nuke laser? If it's specifically expensive enough to prevent nukes becoming worthless with one or two built (maybe use LOTS of energy as opposed to reloading?) then have at it.

My biggest problem with proposing more nuke defenses is that we create an array of ways to deter anyone who spends any kind of resources on nukes but then only have one type of nuke launcher. See where the problem is? There are too many ways to defend against a weapon type that everyone knows how to defend against and has no other tricks to prevent becoming obsolete early into the game.

As for nuke launchers, I quite like the concept of them being disposable, like building a Topol-M or a static launchpad with the missile already built, then once it's been fired it's a useless vehicle/structure and you have to build another one. Obviously that wouldn't work for missile submarines though, unless you had them launch with 6 warheads already installed.