Nukes to weak

[Terser]

I can remember this issue being raised back when Civ III first hit the shelves. The consensus then was likely the same as it is now--nukes are underpowered, and their usage--especially their over usage--has little or no negative ramifications.

It's a part of the game I would love to see fleshed out in a potential future X-pack(assuming there is one).

My argument from the very beggining is that the actual impact of the nuclear weapon should devestate the city or area being hit. Cities should lose a significant amount of their citizens and buildings/wonders. A wide area around ground zero--say at least 10 squares out--should be covered in fallout.

And that fallout should be different than pollution. I would represent it by the death's head symbol used to signify pollution in Civ 2. The fallout should take an incredible amount of time to clean up, even for multiple workers focusing on one square. And units standing on fallout squares at the end of the turn should have a percentage chance of dying from radiation sickness (similar to disease on jungle/flood plain/marsh squares, but with fallout having a much higher chance of being lethal.)

Just what I would like to see. Probably won't or can't happen.

[vee4473]

from what I can recall from when I used a nuke in the game, I think that the blast damage and relative pollution as they are now are probably ok for tactical nukes...probably

but I think that ICBM's should absolutely incinerate any city regardless of size, and quite possibly multiple cities and entire sections of a continent.

Of course balanced by enormous cost and perhaps some sort of probability that the defending nation would have something like a 75% chance of automatic retaliatory launch (meaning that even if a city with an ICBM is wiped out, they were able to launch a counter strike before impact. And even though you would see your city gone on the next turn, it shows that the ICBM launched and is on it's way back to the attacker).

ehh, who knows.

[rendelnep]

And also why global warming? shouldn't all that dust and the toxic fumes from the incinerated cities actually cause a nuclear winter?
that was why everybody was so worried about in the first place.
What should happen is jungle turns in to forest (if there is any left ) and plains and grassland turn into Tundra. Then the sea levels go down after so many tundra squares are made. that would be more realistic

[vmxa1]

Global warming has been in civ a long time, so don't expect it to change much or make sense. It is what it is any resemblance to reality is a bonus.

[Shogun Gunner]

Originally posted by WarpStorm
vee4473, you are correct. There is essentially no difference between nukes.

Range only.

[Verto]

It's a shame nukes have been so pathetic. It takes out all the fun.

[vmxa1]

It really does not matter if they are pathetic as they are just to late to be deployed. The game is over before then.

[Nude Moonbase]

Nukes are just about the most unrealistic aspect of civ. First of all, the power of nukes grew 10,000 fold since the beginning of the nuclear age, yet there is only one kind of nuke available in civ, with only two delivery systems. A modern nuke would destroy the largest city, outlying areas, and render the area uninhabbitable for years or decades. And this is not the same as global warming, which is caused by an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I think this is a somewhat important point, people should know the difference between radioactive fallout and greehouse emmisions. Fallout is the result of ionized and radioactive particals, it cannot be "cleaned up." The best you can do is dispose of contaminated soil and other matter, which would be a massive undertaking (it's not like you can burn it, that would just release the radioactivity into the air). Even a small number nuclear explosions would kill tens of thousands or millions outside the blast area (depending on population density) via radioactive fallout. Nuclear winter is the result of dirt and other stuff getting kicked into the air by the explosion, blocking the sun. A full scale nuclear war would result in massive starvation, plauge and huge drains on money and resources caring for a population more dying than alive. Nukes in civ don't deserve to be called nukes, they're really a joke. Of course, making nukes realistic would require a whole new kind of diplomacy, one which I don't think the current AI is capaple of (keeping in mind that this is an AI that will declare war if I ask them to move a worker out of my territory, stack workers in cities on the front lines that are about to be captured, keep a warrior around to defend against panzers, leave pollution unattended for a hundred years, and ignore my requests for peace when I have two aircraft carriers, twenty tanks and a dozen cruise missiles aimed at their capital which is defended by ten engineers, a warrior, and a bomber). The funniest nuke story i have is when I was once nuked and the next turn they had a "We Love the President Day." The reason? Half the people were dead, so it wasn't crowded.

[Shogun Gunner]

Originally posted by Nude Moonbase The funniest nuke story i have is when I was once nuked and the next turn they had a "We Love the President Day." The reason? Half the people were dead, so it wasn't crowded.

That is pretty funny.

Can't disagree with your post, however I believe the key word here is "playability."

It wouldn't be much of a game if nukes had the same power as the real ones...it would be pretty much game over.

[pedrojedi]

Perhaps they should just set different blast areas for tactical and ICBM nukes. Depending on map size, the area affected could change.

[vulture]

Neither of the nuke units are well named. They both seem to have around the power of the earliet nuclear weapons (Hiroshima-style bombs) - basically causing a lot of damage to a single city and contaminating the immediate countryside.

Not that ICBMs would be that much more powerful on the scale of the game - they're not going to take out two major cities in the real world, so they can't really have a bigger blast - just a bigger effect on what they do hit (more population lost, more units lost, more city improvements trashed).

Tactical nukes (in the real world sense of the words) wouldn't do a huge amount of damage in civ3 terms. If we use the usual convention that a single unit represents a large military force (1 modern armour = perhaps 1,000 tanks worth of fighting power - although I don't think the designers had any particular 'translation' to the real world in mind), then a single tac nuke isn't going to do more than take off 1 hps worth of tanks, even under ideal (or worst case, depending on your point of view) circumstances.

Perhaps tactical weapons would be better represented by some kind of nuclear artillery (with very high attack strength, lethal bombard and good rate of fire), and causing pollution on the target square only.

Regarding the 'nuclear winter' effect - that would have to be some kind of non-linear function of the number of nukes used in 1 turn. 1 nuke per year for 100 years might not cause massive environmental changes. 100 in a few minutes may well produce a far more dramatic effect. Perhaps there should be some 'global damage' counter (start at zero - at the end of each turn, add on the square of the no. of nukes used that turn (6 nukes = 36 'points') - subtract some fixed number (e.g. 1) every turn). How this global damage parameter is used (in terrain changes, or loss of global food production or something) is another question entirely.

Not that any of this is going to be put into civ 3 of course. It's far too late to make that kind of change to the game engine now.

[rendelnep]

I suppose they should be seen as an anomynous Weapon of Mass Destruction. Perhaps they are more akin to a mass gas attack. Cleaning and disposing of sarin or other nasty organophosphate poisions would in my opinion parallel with the civ3 nukes

[Mad Bomber]

Come on Guys, there is no way possible for anyone to completely show the horrors of Nuclear War. The power of these weapons is just beyound the scale of this game. To comprehend the nature of a nuclear war I will give the destructive power of a single US SSBN. Carrying the latest missle the D-5 Trident the Ohio class boomer can launch a missle with 12 MIRV's, each with the power of 470 KT (appox 100 x's the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima). The Submarine carries 24 missles; enabeling this submarine to unleash energy in exceess of 20,000 Hiroshima bombs. The US currently deploys 29 of these submarines world wide, each able to hit targets more than 5000 nm away.

Nukes do seem lame in CIV 3, but if it were to show the true destructive power of nukes (or even a close approximation) then we would just end up with an AI asking us if we would enjoy a nice game of checkers.

[Arrian]

Nukes do seem lame in CIV 3, but if it were to show the true destructive power of nukes (or even a close approximation) then we would just end up with an AI asking us if we would enjoy a nice game of checkers.

-Arrian

[vee4473]

Originally posted by Mad Bomber


Nukes do seem lame in CIV 3, but if it were to show the true destructive power of nukes (or even a close approximation) then we would just end up with an AI asking us if we would enjoy a nice game of checkers.

well,

wouldn't including the potential for the world to totally be destroyed due to nuclear war be a simulation of reality?

it seems that nukes were powered down so that their use wouldn't be an overpowered game ending thing, but in doing so, they left reality behind...they should have just left nukes out all together.

modeling the true destructive forces of an all out nuclear war would have been something that could end the game in 1 or 2 turns yes, but the same thing means game over in real life too...