So, in order to tell those newbies who think nukes are cool, I wrote a story on how my great civilization was reduced to ruins merely because I wondered what would happen if I built nukes. Here goes:

It was the year 1954 AD, and things were going great for me. My spacecraft had been launched in 1940 (with an expected landing date of 1984) and my cities had a high rate of living-but no SDI Defenses. My empire, the English Republic, was middling-size, and occupied most of a southern peninsula. I was at war with a minor but advanced civilization, the Chinese, and allied with the other remaining empires, the Celts and Indians. We'd formed an alliance after the fall of the Carthaginian Empire around 1740.

Now, as I said, I wondered what would happen if I built a couple of nukes, in one of my border cities, Oxford. This was around 1935. I mean, might as well let the Chinese know that I have nukes. Unfortunely, I'd already built the Manhatten Project (note to new gamers: never, ever, build the Manhatten Project; read on and you'll see why) and therefore the Chinese built some more. It escalated, until I had about ten nukes in four cities. I had to raise the luxury rate to 40% to calm my citizens.

The English-Chinese war was going rather badly for the Celts, my allies, and whose capital and two other cities occupied the main route taken by Chinese troops to reach my cities. The capital, Cardiff, and the cities of Kells and Cork were under heavy attack. While the Chinese were busy fighting the Celts, they came to me asking for a ceasefire. I agreed, as the capture of any of those Celtic cities would put the Chinese within nuking range (16 squares) of the center of my empire.

Two turns later, in 1956, the Chinese grew bored of the ceasefire and attacked-before my troops could bring aid to the Celtic cities. Kells fell almost immediately, Cork the next turn. Cardiff fell after being barraged by Cruise missiles in 1959, and President Cunobelin and his cabinet fled to Caernavron, a out of the way city on a small island. The Chinese could now launch nukes on my capital York (moved from London during a minor war as it was more defensible), and the large cities of London, Nottingham, and Hastings. Suddenly, everything became a lot more serious for me. I built two transport ships and loaded them with Engineers and Armors, ready to flee to a small uninhabited island in case the worst happened.

The next two years, 1960-62, were bad. Not only were the Chinese building nukes, a large barbarian invasion occured on the other side of my empire. Now fighting two wars, my resources became extremely strained. The Chinese gained more and more ground, not only coming from the former heartland of the Celts, but sweeping around an inner sea in the center through the Indian empire, ravaging it.

In 1962, the Chinese captured the two cities closest to them: Oxford and Dover. Now, Oxford was where I had orinigally built my nuclear arsenal. The Chinese were now in posession of three nuclear missiles. I sent the carrier with the Engineers to the small island that year, too, and moved the capital from York to the smaller city of Liverpool. I loaded my other nukes onto a two transports, prepared to send them to the Chinese heartland.

The next year,I was moving a nuke from Hastings to one of the transports near Oxford. Now, what happened next was a huge blunder on my part. I pressed the wrong direction key, and the nuke went into the city of Oxford. My jaw dropped as Oxford was destroyed, not because it was destroyed, but because of the Chinese counterattack. Sure enough, next turn, four nukes were fired from Dover and Oxford (they'd built one more). They hit the cities of York, London, Hastings, and Nottingham, destroying most of my army and the nukes I could not get onto the carriers. In an odd note, the barbarians, whom I had been losing to, took the cities, and cheated the Chinese. I was forced to withdraw the rest of my army from the eastern part of my empire, where the barbarians had attacked. I was forced to desert three cities in order to prevent the Chinese from completely destroying my empire.

By 1966 the Engineers whom had left for that small island had built two cities, Brighton and Norwich. By this time, it was becoming clear that the Chinese were intending to destroy me completely. But now was the time for the counter-counter attack! I had six nukes in two transports off the Chinese heartland. Before a battleship destroyed them, I got off four nukes which hit Beijing (their capital), Shanghai, Canton, and Shantung. Two years later and they'd have had SDI Defenses.

In 1969, four cities were left in what used to be the English Republic. Two were the new cities on the small island, and the others were my capital, Liverpool, plus Newcastle. I'd fallen on hard times. Both cities were pretty bad, and my spaceship was destroyed after the nuclear attack. They were both on a long peninsula, with Liverpool at the end and Newcastle at the head. A huge invasion fleet sailed for both cities. I loaded three transports, my last, with all the soldiers and engineers in the two cities, and also moved the government to Brighton. They got there in 1970, and the Chinese took Liverpool and Newcastle.

So ends the main part of my story. The last nuke was fired in 1975, against the Celtic city of Caernavron. The next two years, global warming shrank the size of my island and also changed the plains and grassland there into swamps and jungles. Because of this, and the nukes, the other empires suffered greatly. The twin cities of Brighton and Norwich remained until I retired in 1998. The Chinese fleet would have taken them, too, but a barbarian invasion destroyed most of the troops before they got there, and I held them off. The Celts and Indians were also nuked, and shrunk to a fraction of their size. In 1998, when I retired, I made sure never, ever, to use nukes again in a game.

Well, hope you liked my story. Send comments, etc. to
mailto:seanr@rogerswave.ca. Happy Civving!