There WILL be Nukes (?)

Wr1tt3n by Amok, 20.01.2011 at 00:54

Quote from the FAQ:

Qu0t3:

Since the game is supposed to represent the pre-nuclear conflict, the name seemed appropriate. But mostly we picked it because it sounds cool.

True, there's not much "nuclear" in the game as we planned at first. Actually, as of now, there's none of it.
But, eventually, we plan to live up to that name. So yes, there will be nukes

OK, so this statement really floored me when I read it, though I didn't know how to respond.

1) Nukes are awesome -- otherwise Iran and North Korea wouldn't be going to all the trouble just to get them....

2) Nukes have the (overwhelming) possibility of completely unbalancing the game:

Look at the controversy over the whole Marine thing, and imagine what happens if you added Nuclear Missiles to the mix. Creating a Nuke unit seems completely unfeasible (one missile will completely destroy a city? Are we going to have to add fallout shelters or Satellite defense systems? etc.)

The one idea I had was that it would be a VERY expensive and time-consuming process to create one (otherwise imagine someone joining midgame and quickly creating a Nuke to destroy the established players!) So one would have to concentrate a complete countries entire resource budget over multiple weeks (8? 16?) towards building a nuke--gives opponents a chance to try and stop the process either through Diplomacy or invading said country looking for the so-called "Weapons of Mass Destruction"

specter: WTF? Why the hell did you just send 25 Stealth Bombers into my Cap?
King Cow: Uhhh.....I had intelligence that you were developing Weapons of Mass Destruction.
specter: Can't you READ? I'm not the one who is building nukes!

Vula is developing a Nuclear program [week 7 of 9]
(side note: mmmmmm 7 of 9....pardon me, I'm having a Jeri Ryan moment)

In any case, the possibilities are endless, but the possibilities for completely unbalancing your game are also endless.....

OK, we will do our absolute not to let nukes unbalance the game (although I suspect there will be complaints, no matter what we do). Most likely they will not be available for mass-production (or it will be a long and expensive process).

Hey Ivan, how about making it a first person to reach X amount of money gets nukes? say 50k. Make it a unique game type called 'Cold war' and set a variable for the amount of cash needed to get nukes. Once a player gets nukes he gets a special 'Silo' unit that if its not destroyed with in 10 turns auto-wins for the player?

How about that you can only have acces to nukes after x amount of turns, it will cost a lot of money and the only thing it does is eradicate every unit in a area.

Another cool thing is that after a nuke has been detonated, a radiation zone will spawn where it blew up. What this does it "attacks" any unit that goes through it, but its a weak attack.

I heard something about cards you earn a while back. nukes will probably be involved with that. but i would love to see some of those other ideas happening. they add adrenaline to strategy games

Wr1tt3n by Ivan, 04.01.2011 at 03:46

Collectable cards - I always loved the cards in Risk, a great way to quickly collect a combination and get reinforcements at a particularly crucial moment. The cards we plan to introduce work quite differently, but the idea is similar - you get cards as rewards during battles or at the end of the game and can trade them during the game for various benefits.

Each card will be featuring one of the game's cities and (random) benefits will range from a temporary boost to reinforcements in one city to receiving a rare unit to detecting stealth across the map etc. In addition to that, it would be possible to collect the cards on a special world map in you profile - essentially filling your personal map city by city.

Yes, here is a reminder about what Ivan said about cards. It is indeed something cool to look forward to!

The cards thing is hugely complicated and involves tons of work. However, we hope to finish it before v1.0. Other possibilities for nukes involve randomly awarded rare units after capturing cities (remember Robo-Santa?), in-game research/projects (currently abandoned idea) and allowing to build nukes during 'sudden death' (last few turns before turn limit is reached).

Wr1tt3n by Ivan, 13.02.2011 at 03:50

The cards thing is hugely complicated and involves tons of work. However, we hope to finish it before v1.0. Other possibilities for nukes involve randomly awarded rare units after capturing cities (remember Robo-Santa?), in-game research/projects (currently abandoned idea) and allowing to build nukes during 'sudden death' (last few turns before turn limit is reached).

Well the problem with it being randomly rewarded is it would be very unfair to other players, if you ask me, just slap a 5000 price tag on em and make em only available at capitols.

I don't like the idea of nukes at all. I think it will be very hard to balance them.

Nonetheless if nukes make their way to the game, I think they should be only aviable during the last turns or some defence structures have to be also aviable. Also I think it's better if nukes can only hit citys. The citys can be "upgraded" with the mentioned defence structures, which defends the city from incoming nukes so that the attacker requires higher amounts of nukes to hit the city.
If a nuke hits a city it should kill all units inside and have an effect on the recruitment like cutting the number of aviable units to 50%-75% for a "few" turns.

Just what I though about. Don't know if its helpful at all. Also excuse the lack of english skills :p

I don't like the idea of nukes, think about it, your trying to be as realistic as possible. Nukes now are so powerful that 4 well placed nukes could destroy all life on earth. Forget about military deaths, all the population of the city would be wiped out, the whole city, the whole country and countries near it will be completely wiped off the map. No income would be coming from it and no reinforcements, that's for sure.

You should all know about MAD - Mutually assured destruction, the idea was: you have nukes, so do we, if you fire one at us, we will fire all ours at you and end all life on earth, if you decide to attack us, we will nuke you. Nukes are the reason Russia and USA are at peace.

Trying to be realistic, and adding nukes at the same time, just doesn't work, it will completely unbalance the game. Period.

I think the game would be better if there was a wider selection of units, and there was a rock paper scissor like system where certain units had a real big advantage over others. instead of just building huge stacks and using brute force, it would be more guerrilla, like wars today are fought.

Wr1tt3n by nonames, 03.03.2011 at 09:45

I think the game would be better if there was a wider selection of units, and there was a rock paper scissor like system where certain units had a real big advantage over others. instead of just building huge stacks and using brute force, it would be more guerrilla, like wars today are fought.

That would be the worse thing that could happen to this game... I would HATE a rock paper scissors system I think what they have going now is Freaking AWESOME LOVE the game dont play any other game now.. and when I leave to go fight a REAL war which is next month on my down time if and when I have some I will be relaxing and enjoying this game

Anyone foun a nuke, only NON-nukes here

Ok nukes Would NOT imbalance the game Because they taget only 1 city per nuke and are distroyed upon impact so if you build defensive lines and dont stack troops then they cant distroy all your units with 1 nuke.
Hear is a nuke strike in my mind
1nuke launched from britton at germany targeting berlin
berlin looses all units at target but keeps all defensive lines units in other citys and the country.
i feel 1 nuke should cost about 10units to buy or 2k gold to ballance out the loose
Now here is the advantage.
if you try caping just my capital i could nuke it 1 turn before i capture it back to cleen out your troops stoping those big stack hit my cap on first turn players

week end of nukes
there expensive,they still have range, there detectable, they dont capture anything, and if you wanted to add real world economic impacts they lower the countrys ability to produce.

Defence for nukes, dont stack your units, form defensive lines around captured citys.

O yea let me add they can be shot down.

Hmm so if they are attacked they have no deffence?

YEP no defence there gone though if they hit you first your tost lol.

What about radiation?
Like X turns after being nuked you can't build units or something..

I dealt wonder what is possible with our current platform. Or how much work is needed to implement these things

I would like to know where Joel found his information on how to destroy the world with 4 nukes. I'm pretty sure if this was possible we would all be dead, or there would be much more worrying about other countries acquiring nukes aka actual war. I found this article on the internet (could be true or false) because i doubted 4 nukes could kill everyone.


"
The total global nuclear arsenal is about 30,000 nuclear warheads with a destructive capacity of 5,000 megatons (5,000 million tons of TNT).

An air burst (detonating a bomb above the surface) would produce far more damage and death via radioactive fallout than one detonating at ground level.

A single 100 megaton air burst would be enough to cause a nuclear winter and pollute the Earth for many years. Theoretically, a 100 megaton bomb detonated below ground could produce a massive earthquake and the constant explosions of a full blown nuclear war may also cause numerous earthquakes around the globe. But this would not destroy the world nor all human life.

Globally there are not enough nuclear bombs to completely kill every human. The Tsar Bomb (largest bomb ever detonated) had a fallout of 1000 square kilometers, and was 50 MT. The world is close to 150 million square kilometers, and the human population covers close to 18 million square kilometers.

Therefore to get a rough idea we can say hypothetically that the 5000 megatons of nuclear warheads was 100 Tsar Bombs (the same value in megatons). If these bombs were detonated their total radioactive fallout would cover 100,000 square kilometers.

It may be surprising to hear that this covers less than 1% of the area that the human population covers, which should give a general idea of the miniscule size of impact this would have on the total world's surface. Therefore it can be shown that we do not have the capacity at the moment to destroy the world with nuclear warheads.

However, there are factors we have overlooked, which include:
- Tsar Bomb has very small radioactive fallout in comparison with its megaton value
- Nuclear warheads can be assumed to target densely populated locations, and
- Nuclear winter which would result in the radioactive fallout

To put curiosity to rest, even if we replaced our Tsar Bomb equation with nuclear warheads that had a higher radioactive yield to fulfill the 5000 megatons global nuclear arsenal we would still not come close to the amount of radioactive fallout required to cover the area the human population covers, let alone destroy the world.

If nuclear warheads were targeted at densely populated locations it would increase the fatalities of a nuclear war, however this would still not wipe out humanity, let alone destroy the world.

Nuclear winter can in lamer terms be contrasted with the ice age. The ice age did not destroy the world, and did not wipe out all life, therefore neither would nuclear winter. Humanity is extremely resilient, and although many of the world's population die due to starvation if they did not die from the initial nuclear war or radiation, life will find a way.
"

Now I'm not fully agreeing with him that the full arsenal couldn't do it I'm pretty sure it could but my initial premise that it would take more than 4 i think is demonstrated

I think for now you should just add the bomb and think about radiation and how to impliment it after you decide how much of a handycap you need to give those players useing them.

Let me add an idea to the Nuke Equasion.
Here is an idea to instill nukes
1 you have to have a weekly income of 2k
2 you have to spend 500 upkeep
3 they cost 2k

so here is the math
a country that qualifys for nukes with an income of 2k will only be able to build MAX 4 nukes and thats if they have no other troops
as they go past 2.5k then they can have a stockpile of 5 with this method nukes dont get over built but still are afordable for any player to achive.
this also kinda mimics real life because week countrys dont have the resorces to invest in nuclear tecnology and have not developed them
also building nukes would make it harder to defend and attack because your troops would become more limited every time you built one unless you use it right away.
Another thing, if your hitting folks with nukes people will think there stratagys through much more and look at you diferent then those who dont have them.