Things still missing from Civ...

[Dis]

paratroopers are still missing, AEGIS cruisers are still missing. Air power having a greater effect on ships is still missing.

[Dis]

and nuclear explosions should not cause global warming. What science class did these programmers attend?

[Tattila the Hun]

Yah, it should cause nuclear winter...

[LzPrst]

there should be some kind of non-nuclear pollution that increased global warming involved... but how to add that without adding more micromanagement, which is the very reason why the took it out to start with....

and agree with Dis. no GW for nuking. that's just plain silly. it is a remnant from older civ games where the combined pollution\fallout squares caused GW. now with the removal of pollution only fallout squares cause GW, which is of course, silly

[Blaupanzer]

I suspect the non-nuclear pollution got removed because everyone hated the pollution chasing in the end game -- very tedious. Health replaced all that, very effectively IMO. Can't say how or why the nuclear fallout = global warming came about. Supposed to provide a disincentive to nuke use I suspect. I haven't seen the AI use nukes on barbs yet, but that may be in part because I am very aggressive about the Manhatten Project. I use my spies to search for it in progress, and will launch an immediate war to go after that city if I find it. Of course the game is usually close to ending, if it has lasted that long, because the AI and I will be locked in the space race. About half the time we don't get there as I have dominated or fallen too far behind and retired.

[Prussia]

I admit that GW from nukes isn't very logical, but it works, doesn't it?

[Dis]

yeah but nukes aren't that great to begin with. So now there is never any reason to use them.

And I always build manhatten project myself. I usually build a couple of nukes. I never use them, I just like having them.

[Unimatrix11]

Definenately the whole modern era needs to get better... nukes the way they are now just suck. they were much better handled in civ3. The manhattan project should be a national wonder IMO. Smaller nukes should be there and ICBMs....

And, yes, global warming should not be caused by nukes, but by "unhealth" (newspeak?) - a cities contribution to it should be something like: "unhealth" minus 10 (or 15 or 20 or whatnot) * factor = raise of probability of global warming... tadaa... whats so hard about that ?

[Kuciwalker]

I think the game would be just dandy if there weren't nukes in the first place.

And global warming is just stupid. It should have been cut along with all the other irritating features (e.g. pollution) when Soren made Civ 4.

[Brael]

Nukes are good, Civ 4's implementation of them is bad. They shouldn't cause global warming and should be more devastating to a city (if they hit). If a nuke hits a city, it should be a city you wouldn't want in the future, atleast not for many turns... like a successful nuke being the equilavent of temporarily razing the city, it would just be useless for awhile.

I'm not sure if the AI could really handle it though. Nukes should be more about mass/mutual destruction. If you nuke someone rather than get diplomatic hits, on the following turn every civ in the game with nukes should get the option of nuking you (anything in your territory) without having to declare war and your opponent being able to counterstrike without having the same repurcussion. This would probally require Civ having second strike capabilities though (space based or sub based nukes, or even missle silos that you could hide in your territory, that isn't visible to other civs (maybe a chance to have them visible by stealing military plans).

I guess what I'm getting at is nukes could be interesting but the more complexity thats added the lower the chance that the AI can handle it gets. If a nuke would have a 40% chance of out right destroying each building (non world/national wonder... maybe a smaller chance for them), strip all city radius tiles of upgrades except roads/rails, prevent those tiles from being rebuilt for 10 turns, cut the citys population in 1/4, quadruple the unhealthiness effects in the city, destroy all missles in a city, remove all defensive bonuses from the city/radius tiles, give the city revolt like effects for a few turns so it produces nothing for 20 turns or so on marathon (but still keeps its culture so your borders don't disapper) they would be powerful. After the revolt effects (chaos from trying to rebuild/find survivors?) faded the city could begin to regrow with the added unhealthy gradually fading over the next 80 turns or so (100 turns total to recover from a nuke, on marathon).

Mitigating the nukes would be a chance to shoot the nuke down from an SDI, with fallout shelters cutting the population loss in 1/3 and halving the duration of all other effects (maybe decrease the chance of a building being destroyed somewhat too).

Incentive to not use nukes would be a MAD concept where if you nukes on someone, every civ in the world on their next turn could nuke you without declaring war, recieving negative diplomatic status for it, or having this applied to them on the retaliation. Nukes could be protected with followup techs that would allow you to place them in silos outside of cities, on submarines, or in space (probally require a seperate interface for that).

If that were done, nukes would be much improved in Civ I think.

[Kuciwalker]

Nukes are good, Civ 4's implementation of them is bad.

Because they are basically impossible to implement well. The dynamics of nuclear warfare are so drastically removed from any of the other game mechanics as to make their own subgame, and they only appear at the very end of some games. There's really no point.

To a lesser degree this is why the espionage system and the UN suck.

[Brael]

Added to my previous post while you were responding, do you think my idea above would make nukes more effective?

[Kuciwalker]

No. Not your fault, either. It's just that nukes don't work in a game like Civ, which spans 6000 years of human history. For 5950 years, you play one way, and then in the last 50 there's an entire new subgame

It's like in the Zelda games: as the game progresses, you constantly get new items and abilities, but none of them substantially change how you play the game. It takes all of five seconds to figure out how to use the new gameplay elements, and doesn't feel any different from before. In Civ, this doesn't happen. Almost all of the gameplay is available near the beginning of the game, and the fundamentals are available almost immediately. Things like air power and modern naval warfare never quite work right because there are two conflicting issues. First, we are all fairly familiar with modern warfare, enough to demand a degree of realism. Second, we are used to the land combat model. The developers have to keep air* and naval combat based in the same system, even though that's not possible, because you can't radically change the way the game is played in the middle or near the end.

* with air they've mostly moved away from that since civ2, but I think that's probably the source of a lot of its balance issues

[Kuciwalker]

Plus, even semi-realistic nuclear war is really, really boring. You spend a long time staring at the other person, and maybe you end the game by blowing everything up. Yay. And if you implement nukes so unrealistically as to remove MAD, then it's just lame.

[Brael]

Actually the game does vary alot through the game. Modern technology has drastically altered combat and the game has to reflect that but stuff changes during the game without that. A pre siege unit game is very different once you get siege units, a world before astronomy is different from a world after astronomy, engineering is a huge difference in mobility, as is railroad, oil based navies are far more powerful (in terms of options not raw stats) than non oil navies. You get many additional options late in the game, but additional options open up all game, you just have them faster at the end.