Found a use for nukes

[Badtz Maru]

I had recently given Spain a pretty thorough thrashing (razed their two largest cities and pillaged a bunch of gold out of their towns), and then asked them what they would give me for peace. All their gold, 10 per turn, world map. I had some nukes I had built when there was nothing else I needed, so I backed out of diplomacy, sent 4 nukes each to her two largest remaining cities, then went back into diplomacy, and this time she also offered one of her marginal cities on another continent. This was despite both cities having bomb shelters and she only lost about 3 population in each.

Give it a shot, next time you have nukes and are letting someone pay for peace, see what they will offer and then nuke them lightly and ask again.

[Stickyman]

Good idea!

I think I'll try that. I've never used nukes, not even in CivIII.

[SandMonkey]

Playing on Noble, I used a nuke in my current game to help expedite the end of a war. Like you, Badtz, I nuked them after they refused to give in, and it worked very well. The settings for my game are fairly different (Noble, Pangea, Epic, Modern start, Aggressive civs), so the -1 penalty for nuking a civ didn't really hurt very much.

I'm planning on using nukes to soften up the next largest civ when we go to war, so I'll check back in here to let you guys know how it goes.

[SandMonkey]

Global warming

and this is related *enough* to this thread....

What exactly does global warming do? Instict tells me that when the game warns that global warming has occured near a city, i assume that a grassland/plain was changed into a jungle? I've seen it twice in my current game and I just haven't noticed what the terrain specifically looked like before the global warming occured

[axisworks]

Watch out diplomatically when you use nukes. People that used to be friendly with you might drop all the way down to Cautious or Annoyed depending on how badly you nuke someone.

[walkern]

I believe global warming is a tile turned into desert. I've only seen it once, and the tile that the indicator was pointing to was a desert. I don't know what it was before.

[axisworks]

That's exactly what it does... it basically renders a tile worthless, unless it's a hill. I've had cities' populations cut in half because of the loss of farmland. It's highly annoying and there was a thread I started on the subject a while back. As far as anyone could tell, there is no way to reverse it, so eventually the entire planet (if the game was played long enough) would turn to desert.

[walkern]

Doesn't one of the techs provide a way to prevent it?

[Solver]

After you discover Ecology, your Workers can scrub fallout, and thus return the tile to normal. Fallout occurs around the spot you nuked and turns the tiles unworkable - global warming turns tiles to desert and can not be reversed. It can, though, be prevented if you scrub the fallout from your nukes.

It's really tame, in fact. In Civ1, Civ2 or SMAC you could kill yourself if you screwed up the world ecology - the climate would change dramatically, your lands become much less fertile, or you might even lose cities due to raising ocean levels from the polar caps melting.

[Son of David]

I have played games where, after launching half a dozen nukes against an opponent without bomb shelters/SDI (and totally devastating him: in this game nukes are awesome against non-nuke-protected cities but useless against protected ones), I was having two or three productive tiles turn into desert every single turn thereafter.

There are already enough safeguards against nukes so making 'global warming' even more powerful seems a bit ridiculous.

And I also find it ironic that the Civilopedia says of bomb shelters that they had little chance of doing much to prevent nuclear annihilation, yet in this game they reduce it by three-quarters.

[Solver]

I actually think the nukes are too weak with the default settings. They won't even kill enemy units. They are good to cripple the enemy economy, but not that great militarily. I don't think the benefits of using nukes really outweight the negatives in the default settings. I spiced nukes up a bit though .

Oh, if you're nuking someone without bomb shelters and the SDI, chances are, you could run over them with conventional forces, too .

[Solver]

BTW, the reason nuking them makes them surrender better goodies is that the AI takes population into account when evaluating war success. Nukes reduce populations, so a nuked AI considers itself to be losing the war worse.

It's pretty good. The AI doesn't rely exclusively on population count either, but overall, it's a good estimate. After all, if your population decreases significantly during a war, then you're definitely losing.

[walkern]

I just got done playing around with nukes and I must say, they are best used diplomatically. As in, toss a nuke at them to get better deals out of them when you end the war.

I had no experience with prior Civ games; Civ4 is my first. I'm mostly a peaceful player but I've been toying with modern war and decided to give the nuclear option a strong try. Strong it was: I launched 17 ICBMs in one turn. I wasn't really trying to win, I just wanted to see if nuclear stockpiling was effective at all.

No, I'm not really that destructive, but give a kid a sandbox...

The result? Underwhelming. I was hoping to use them on Elizabeth, but she had SDI. I must be unlucky; I think 1 of about 15 got through. I loaded up the save game and decided to try Ghandi instead.

Ghandi didn't have SDI, but boy did he wish he did. Unfortunately, as others said, the result is cool, but not staggering. Every city still had military units and fortification when the dust cleared, although their population was drastically reduced, except for the one city that had managed to throw together a bomb shelter. It wasn't even worthwhile to throw missiles at it.

The other cities I could have ran over with my tank army, but what for? The fallout makes it not worth it. As for scrubbing fallout; you're so late in the game that there's no good reason to take the time to nuke a city, take it, and then scrub the fallout. You might as well just raze it. You could try to use this for a late game dominiation victory if maybe only one other civ exists, but they better not have SDI or you will have completely wasted your time. You could also erase the population of the rest of the planet and grab a diplomatic victory.

Anyways, the lesson is: nuclear stockpiling does not work at all in a real game. Other civs near you in tech will build SDI and completely screw it up, and bombing the bejesus out of someone won't help you anyway. The odds you could get something good out of it are low and rely on a lot of variables. Stay on the defensive, get SDI and shelters done if you see someone building nukes, and take them out via regular units if you have to. Build ICBMs like they're wonders, not units.

On the other hand, a mod that illustrated what would have happened if diplomacy failed during the Cuban Missile Crisis would be educational. Depending on the scope, it probably would only be a few turns though.

Edit: I forgot to mention; one reason I was so underwhelmed was that a friend had played a lot of SMAC and told me about planet busters. I wanted to crater everyone!

[JackRudd]

*remembers days of Civ2 and the Nuke-Paratrooper trick*

*remembers this was horribly overpowered and that's why nukes have been toned down*

[Son of David]

Originally posted by Solver
I actually think the nukes are too weak with the default settings. They won't even kill enemy units. They are good to cripple the enemy economy, but not that great militarily. I don't think the benefits of using nukes really outweight the negatives in the default settings. I spiced nukes up a bit though .

I think you are right about that - however, dropping say two ICBMs on an unprotected city (no shelters etc) pretty much causes most of the troops to be nearly dead. I think this is because one ICBM does 50% damage (or has a 50% chance of destroying each thing in the city) to an unprotected city, i.e. reduces units to half-strength, halves population, destroys half the buildings, contaminates half the surrounding squares etc. So two nukes is enough to reduce almost any city to a near helpless state.

I think it is the nuclear defences that need to be reduced most. Shelters should have a marginal effect and SDI should have only a small chance of interception. The sight of nuclear build-up needs to put the fear of God into people, and start motivating the AIs/player to pass a UN resolution against nukes.

That would make things much more exciting, to know that there are no really effective defences against nukes except to have lots yourself!