My view on those tactical, pre-aimed nukes:
I'll demonstrate using korn's method.
It's player 1's turn. He decides player 3 no longer deserves to live, so he commands his pre-aimed nuke forces to blast him of the planet.
However, these nukes will not launch from their silos untill player 1 is done with his moves and ends his turn. After the missiles are launched, player 1 can't effect their set targets.
At this point, before the actual turn of the next player, all players that posess an active nuclear arsenal will be alerted simultaneously with a popup. They are asked if they want to launch their nukes to their preset targets or hold back. If any of these players select to launch, everybody will again receave a notification and the same questions. This will be repeated untill everyone who might want to fire has fired, or ran out of nukes or held back. Thus, we can have a situation where you can wait to see if somebody launches at you or your allies before firing your own nukes, and if someone does you still have a chance to fire back in the same turn, even if he's turn comes after you.
So something like this would be a log of events displayed to all players:
- Player 1 uses nuclear weapons on Player 3's cities A,B,C,D.
- Player 3 uses nuclear weapons on Player 1's cities I,K,L,M.
- Player 4 (allied with 3) uses nuclear weapons on Player 1's cities E,F,G,H
- Player 2 (allied with 1) uses nuclear weapons on Player 3's cities N,O, and Player 4's cities P,Q.
- Player 3 uses nuclear weapons on Player 2's cities R,S.
- Player 4 uses nuclear weapons on Player 2's cities T,U.
Outside all this, we have Player 5, who has nukes but isn't allied with anybody, so he stays out of it. We also have Player 6, who doesn't have the tech to make nukes, so all he can do is to whatch in horror as 1, 2, 3, and 4 blow the planet up around him.
This seem's rather realistic to me. And since you know that if you fire, the enemy will fire back and you'll also die, and thus we have a balance of terror as long as people remain sane. All this results in a cold war.
Of course this special launching period should have a time limit, to keep down overly long gameplay delays. Make it 30 seconds after each notification or whatever. When in multiplayer, the chat line should also remain open to let players smooth out strategy in middle of the action, although they must make it quick.
After all launch orders are set, the nukes of every player that fired will hit their targets, get countered by SDI or whatever. Once the nukes are on their way, the players can't effect their course, and they can't be canceled. After all the missiles have either either hit or been destroyed, the next player on the list after player 1 gets his normal turn. That is, if there is anything left of his civ.
As for the nuke units, I think the ideas about several types with different uses is good. The type that I used in this model should be a long range missile with a large payload. It should be a unit you can't just move around the map, hopping from city to city. The only way to move them around should be via land carriers. They should be located in silos, that could be airbase-type tile improvements. Each missile would have a preset, changable target. Changing the target should take at least a turn. At launchtime you would select the set targets from a list (like when airlifting in Civ2), and the correct missiles would fire away. Each silo could only hold one missile. All silos would need to be within a city's radius. That city would get massive unhappiness, even more if the silo is loaded. Each silo tile improvement would suck production out of the tile for "upkeep", say one or two shields. If the tile produces zero shield, the number would turn negative, and the cost would needed to be taken from the city shield pool. A nuke unit would still require the support dictated by youur form of govt. All this would resrict how big of an nuke arsenal you can maintain. And as silos could be destroyed by plain old pillaging, it would also create new strategies concerning their placement.
Other, smalleer and more conventional nukes should also be available. They should function much like the ones we know and love, or maby some other way.
As for other diplomatic aspects of nuking, and the implementation of fallout, I'll go with korn.
[This message has been edited by Kumiorava (edited May 06, 2000).]
) that the only way to counterattack against the incoming wave of RTS games is to "dig and improve" the concept of Simultaneous turns and to graft it into old TBS one-time-our-hero genre.
