Lord Parkin Wrote:I think nukes inflicting non-lethal collateral damage is a good idea. The main issue with nukes is that with just a couple of them you can make a stack of any size - 50, 200, 1000 units - literally disappear. If instead you could damage all the units but not actually kill any, that would appear at a glance to be more balanced.
Yeah, that kinda has to go for them to work in a game with unlimited units per tile.
Quote: I think there needs to be a price hike as well though, so that they're more of a last resort / insurance measure. I think from a game balance perspective it has to be significantly less cost efficient to inflict collateral damage on an average sized stack with nukes than with Bombers (which already have to contend with other air units).
There are multiple options here that would alter the effectiveness of tac nukes (I'll come to ICBMs later):
- Ability to evade interception. It is currently set to 50% so fighters can shoot them down, but it can be changed to any number so that they do not have to contend with fighter interception. This would be a fairly major change and would have to be considered if it should occur before the other changes were implemented because if tac nukes are nerfed to provide limited collateral, and they can be intercepted, then it means that if you lack oil to build your own fighters tac nukes are a lot worse, which means that oil would remain the. Basically, I think tac nukes should have 100% evade chance because it'll make it easier to balance, and it means that if you lack oil you aren't totally screwed. Guided Missiles (GM) do have 100% evade interception chance FWIW.
- Combat strength: I think this needs to be tested to see how strong nukes need to be to be to beat up CG marines. Guided missiles are S40, and 60 hammers in base, and pretty weak because they can't collateral, but they don't do much damage to basic marines either. But they can bomb down cultural defenses so they have some utility. Something that might want to be considered is giving TN the ability to remove culture defense, but that would have to be balanced against GM.
- Amount of units that could be hit with collateral: If a tac nuke (TN) can only hit 6 units, then pricing it at 1K hammers would probably make them cost inefficient compared to bombers that can be reused, even if you need to invest in fighters (which you have to any way to protect yourself from bombing). Not exactly difficult to balance, we can easily make TN either cheap and weak or costly and strong just by altering the hammer cost, strength and number of units that can be hit by collateral. Because of granularity, I think it is better for Tac nukes to be cheapish and not too powerful, but there are lots of decisions to be made here:
- If nukes are expensive and powerful, then it's easier to make them in a rush buy economy on a 2 turn basis, when you turn your entire empire over to war. You also need less subs to carry the missiles into position, so you can dedicate more of the navy to water superiority. If you make missiles cheaper, you need more subs to carry the nukes so it's harder to control the water (well, those are the basics).
- If nukes are weak and weak, you can more easily calculate how many you will need to weaken a garrison to the point where you can attack with conventional units and win easily. If nukes are powerful (eg 15 units affected by collateral, 90% max collateral, 900 hammers on normal), it's harder to calculate how many nukes to use.
- Late game war on quick speed is affected by unit build times - you are limited by the number of cities you have that can make 1 turn builds, otherwise you can rush buy any unit and complete it in 2 turns. Need to consider the effect of making nukes so expensive that an empire that is running mass workshop strategies can't regularly 1 or 2 turn the nukes has on the ability to build collateral. This would suggest that the cost of nukes should be tied to expected hammer output during the late game for workshop economies, which implies that the collateral effects should be balanced at that hammer cost.
- If nukes are expensive and powerful, then it's easier to make them in a rush buy economy on a 2 turn basis, when you turn your entire empire over to war. You also need less subs to carry the missiles into position, so you can dedicate more of the navy to water superiority. If you make missiles cheaper, you need more subs to carry the nukes so it's harder to control the water (well, those are the basics).
ICBMs and SDI need to be considered as well. ICBMs can be altered to just be TN with unlimited range, and/or they can be stronger than TM affecting more units with collateral etc.
- ICBM can have a different strategic aim than TM - they don’t have to exist for collateral but it could be one of the functions. I currently have difficulty figuring out how ICBM “should” work other than as TN with unlimited range. In unmodded BtS, they are used to disconnect resources and destroy an enemies, but with the removal of the nuke function that isn’t particularly viable because while the ICBM could be given the terrain bombard function it wouldn’t be able to remove any workers stacked on the tile, ergo it wouldn’t have any effect except in PB games with turnsplits, which is just fugly. Any opinions on how ICBM should function would be useful.
- SDI needs a new purpose. It can probably just be left in as nukes won’t exist for it to affect.
- Fallout shouldn’t exist anymore.
Quote:One other thought... should there also be a cap on the number of units that can get collateral damage from a given nuke, or just a set amount dealt to every unit in the targeted tile/area?
Cap on units is generally best as it makes nukes work the same against small stacks and large stacks, removing a variable that is difficult to balance.
Quote:It would also be nice to mod nukes so that they can be used in your own territory. One problem with them now is that they're yet-another offensive weapon in the phase where the game heavily favors offense. Defensive nukes might be a good counter to marines+transports, if they had enough range.
Nukes can be used in your own lands already.
