I have only tinkered with nukes a little after winning a space race and continuing to play, but it got me to thinking about how devastating these weapons could be if used properly. I know there were some threads about nukes being too weak, that they "only" half the population and have a 50% chance to destroy each unit and city improvement. Granted this is not as powerful as they were in civ 2, or so it seems at first glance.
A nuke or ICBM can be devastating if it targets an enemy capital, cutting off trade by land and likely destroying the harbor and airport. If it misses one or both you can hit it again, to disconnect their trade agreements. Then you could use them on strategic resources like aluminum and uranium that they have, crippling them militarily, and in the space race, which is the main reason you would want to do this, and then only if you can't cut them off with conventional means, because the penalties are harsh. Looking at the fallout we see that disrupting luxury trades will force higher luxury allocation for both the target civ and others, most of the others will declare war which will eventually force them to drop out of representative government(you will too, I tried this in a democracy and had instant major war weariness problems), and tradable strategic resources to disappear from the market. You can use the war to seize aluminum and uranium and keep a few cities cranking out ICBMs to isolate capitals and disconnect other resources as needed.
One thing, you have to know you stand to lose the space race soon enough that your isolation and resource denial matters. They really are a 'desperate measure', they suck for capturing cities because of all the pollution and disconnected roads they make.
A nuke or ICBM can be devastating if it targets an enemy capital, cutting off trade by land and likely destroying the harbor and airport. If it misses one or both you can hit it again, to disconnect their trade agreements. Then you could use them on strategic resources like aluminum and uranium that they have, crippling them militarily, and in the space race, which is the main reason you would want to do this, and then only if you can't cut them off with conventional means, because the penalties are harsh. Looking at the fallout we see that disrupting luxury trades will force higher luxury allocation for both the target civ and others, most of the others will declare war which will eventually force them to drop out of representative government(you will too, I tried this in a democracy and had instant major war weariness problems), and tradable strategic resources to disappear from the market. You can use the war to seize aluminum and uranium and keep a few cities cranking out ICBMs to isolate capitals and disconnect other resources as needed.
One thing, you have to know you stand to lose the space race soon enough that your isolation and resource denial matters. They really are a 'desperate measure', they suck for capturing cities because of all the pollution and disconnected roads they make.
Comment