The Case for Nukes

[Jokka das Trevas]

Gotta agree it's realistic the way it is now.

The main "causa mortis" from nuking come from it's side effects.
You gotta notice that even with people dying a lot and many military units not being fully affected, all surrounding squares are crapped.

So, if a city above sive 14 or so gets nuked, not only will pop die but also die later from starvation since all surrounding squares are unusable.

[korn469]

Jokka das Trevas

You gotta notice that even with people dying a lot and many military units not being fully affected, all surrounding squares are crapped

all surrounding squares are not crapped exactly

what happens is that grassland squares become plains and plains become desert...i does not appear that other squares change, and of course this only applies to surrounding 8 squares (the ones covered by pollution)

[Strollen]

I mostly agree with the premise that Nukes are a bit underpowered in Civ3. I also think that they should count significantly in diplomacy. I did notice that nuke are a big factor in your power rating which probably means nukes are taken into account in diplomacy but it isn't obvious to the players. I miss the "MY words are backed by nuclear weapons" diplomatic response from CIV2.

However, I think a couple of factors need to be taken into account before dismissing nukes. The AI (and this human) does tend to stack its units a lot making a lot of worthwhile target for the cheaper tac nuke. I'd rather have a tac nuke than a couple of Aegis class cruisers (or even 2 battleships) for stopping an invasion force from landing. I had a lot of cities that produced in the 60-70 range meaning that it took 2 turns to produce a tank or mech or 5 turns to make a tac nuke. From a pure firepower 2 tac nukes, in many situations would be more powerful than say 3 tanks and 2 mechs.


Second the cool thing about ICBM is than can strike anywhere, anytime, which means you could potentially stop somebody from launching a space ship by destroy the cities with a space ship components. (I assume but don't know for a fact that space ship component can be destroyed by a nuke.)

Finally, and most important you can build nukes a lot earlier than most space ship component (right after Fission and Rocketry) and certainly before things like Modern Armor. In the games I've won I started pumping out nukes while at peace, while researching the space station technologies. Producing the space ship parts for me wasn't the problem, researching the technoly was the bottle neck.

[korn469]

However, wiping out a city and the surrounding area isn't practical for one bomb; it could be done with a series of bombs on one town, if you really disliked that town I guess.

Increasing the megatonnage of a weapon beyond 5 megatons is only going to make a bigger light-show, there's diminishing returns at work. The Russians made some silly-arsed 60 megaton job, but just as a stunt.

Incidentally, a nuclear strike on a city, depending on how it's layed out, is only supposed to kill what, 1/3rd to 2/3rds of the population? To my mind the current system is more realistic than what you're proposing. When you bomb a city twice, it's not going to lose the same amount of people. Perhaps if you slavered 5 or 6 mirv nukes on one city it could be made uninhabitable, but when you think about it, a pop 1 city with a few dozen years worth of fallout around it is moderately realistic

Source: Navy

The acquisition costs of about $2.1 billion for conventional
carrier and $4.1 billion for nuclear carrier

Source: Brookings report

MX/Peacekeeper missile (ICBM) — $189.4 million each
Armament:
10 W87 300 kiloton warheads
Subtotal armament — ~$49 million
Total — ~$238 million each

Aircraft Carrier in Civ3: 180 shields
Tac Nuke: 300 shields
ICBM: 600 shields

what i'm saying is for its price at the very least a nuclear weapon in Civ3 represents about 150 200kt warheads which would certainly flatten a large area and kill most of its population...it certainly isn't one large bomb...at 30 200kt warheads per city you could almost certainly obliterate New York, Washington D.C., Los Angles, Chicago, and Boston...so i don't think that its "unrealistic" to ask for fairly powerful nukes

Strollen

From a pure firepower 2 tac nukes, in many situations would be more powerful than say 3 tanks and 2 mechs

well the three tanks would have 9 attacks between them and a modern armor units beats virtually anything besides completely fortified mech infantry

ignoring the cost of the manhatten project, and even ignoring the cost of a nuclear submarine...in the defensive role i think that three modern armor and two mech infantry will outperform two tactical nukes in the majority of circumstances, certainly not all of the time but on average

on the offensive nukes certainly can play a role...but i'm thinking that a strategy which focuses on conventional weapons will work out better with the way that nukes are balanced

so here is what it comes down to

Pros:
*nukes only take 4-6 turns to build in big cities
*in a single turn a nuke can destroy half of a city's population, some buildings, and half of the units while poisoning the land to an extent
*ICBMs can strike anywhere on the map
*nukes attack all units in the stack and all surrounding tiles

Cons:
*must build the Manhatten Project (800 shields) before building nukes
*nukes carry a diplomatic risk of making other civs declare war on you
*nukes used on the defense will poison your land
*nukes cause global warmin which can poison your land
*nukes cannot kill a city
*nukes are highly ineffective against small targets and don't even have a chance of breaking even cost wise except againgst the largest targets (be it a city or large stack of units), however against ungodly targets (100 modern armor in a stack for example) nukes could well pay for themselves ten times over

ok let me ask everyone another question

would it unbalance the game if nukes were any of the following

A) cost 200 for a tacnuke 400 for an ICBM?
B) cost 150 for a tacnuke 300 for an ICBM?
C) more powerful...destroy 75% of a city, can kill size 3 cities and under?

[korn469]

ok here is some more food for thought (or what you have probably came to realize is junk food for the mind )

at the ww.fas.org i found some interesting stuff

As a general guide, city areas are completely destroyed (with massive loss of life) by overpressures of 5 psi, with heavy damage extending out at least to the 3 psi contour. The dynamic pressure is much less than the overpressure at blast intensities relevant for urban damage, although at 5 psi the wind speed is still 162 mph - close to the peak wind speeds of the most intense hurricanes.

Suitable scaling constants for the equation r_blast = Y^0.33 * constant_bl
are:
constant_bl_5_psi = 0.71
where Y is in kilotons and range is in km

the formula for area of a circle is pi*r^2
i'm assuming that the forumula is giving the radius of the blast (it can't be area because that would be in km^2)

that means that the area of complete destruction for 30 200kt nuclear wearheads would be 1568km^2

using the 1986 edition of the world book encyclopedia i obtained the area and population figures for a number of large cities

London:
1589km^2
6.61 million

Los Angeles
1204km^2
2.97 million

Mexico City
1500km^2
9.37 million

Moscow
879km^2
8.28 million

New York:
956km^2
7.07 million

Paris:
105km^2
2.18 million

Tokyo:
578km^2
8.35 million

besides london all of the cities would be completly destroyed...now of course a city in civ3 represents more like several combined metropolitan areas, but 100+ 200kt warheads would certainly destroy over half of the highly developed/populated area from blast, thermal, and radiation sources

Firaxis give us nukes with 75% destructive power please

[Pyrodrew]

it certainly isn't one large bomb...
Firaxis give us nukes with 75% destructive power please

Agreed! Nukes need to do more than make us "a little cautious" as someone said. It's a nuke!