Slitherine

I guess I'm a little over half way thru the tech tree and really love the game. I've gotten a little nervous from reading posts about nuclear bombs wiping out cities and stacks of troops. Is there a defense against them? Seem to remember Civ games with bunkers and some sort of sky defense network. I'd like to know what to look for when researching and make sure I build it.

The city defense buildings (Adaptive Bunker Wall is the first, Defense Network was second, I think, and then there's a third one) decrease damage from such ops. However, nothing's stopping the AI from dropping all its nukes (or orbital bombardments) at once in one place, so essentially they always have the power to clear a hex if they want to in mid-to-late game, usually immediately after declaring war. It's best to keep unit stacks small and some distance between them, so that the AI isn't inclined to use these lame game enders too easily, and if it does, you won't lose quite as much at once.

It's possible to turn the nuke tech off from the game by modding some files though, if you're like me and want units to have more meaning in warfare.

More info in a beta post here:
viewtopic.php?f=204&t=46190&p=436369#p436370

I discovered that there is no defense against nuke attacks. I tecked to try to find a shield, but I was nuked (even with black-holes), I could do nothing.
That's sorry, as the game becomes a race to attack first with nukes, to make preventive wars... as there is no shield against nukes for my troops, such as antimissile-missiles.
Having found this, the game has become no fun to me, as I'm not an offensive war fan.

Nukes are good against troops, but are hardly MAD weapons. They take out just 2pop per city, and only affect single tile.

Black holes on the other hand, are true MAD weapons.

I hate to be a nag (not really), but this is why I think the person who initiates nuclear strike should take an immediate and severe hit in diplomacy (sanctions like loss of all trade and research treaties for "x" turns and status of "reserved" opinion by all other factions for like number of turns) to make them think twice about the nuclear option. Just saying'…

NightReaper wrote:I hate to be a nag (not really), but this is why I think the person who initiates nuclear strike should take an immediate and severe hit in diplomacy (sanctions like loss of all trade and research treaties for "x" turns and status of "reserved" opinion by all other factions for like number of turns) to make them think twice about the nuclear option. Just saying'…

Exactly!!! There should be a consequence imposed by other factions when nuclear\blackhole weapons are used. A more extreme case would be that all remaining factions should declare war on the faction that used the weapons.

ERISS wrote:I discovered that there is no defense against nuke attacks. I tecked to try to find a shield, but I was nuked (even with black-holes), I could do nothing.
That's sorry, as the game becomes a race to attack first with nukes, to make preventive wars... as there is no shield against nukes for my troops, such as antimissile-missiles.
Having found this, the game has become no fun to me, as I'm not an offensive war fan.

I just abandoned a game because of this. Pangea with only me against solar dynasty and the religious faction. The AI was hating me to a point of no return and they kept declaring war against me one after the other. I managed to keep them at bay beating wave after wave of heavy tanks. I think i could have eventually slowly counter attack and win the game but the nuke made that impossible. Every 10 turn they wiped one of my city off the map with nukes. (and yes my towns had all both defense building up)

Basically because there is no defense against nuke and black holes using defensive strategy while teching toward victory is not an option. You HAVE to attack and take over the entire map or you will be nuked to the ground, even if you are winning the war. This make games very repetitive as there is only one way of winning. Giving an option to defend against nuke is definitively needed IMO.

boulugre wrote:Basically because there is no defense against nuke and black holes using defensive strategy while teching toward victory is not an option. You HAVE to attack and take over the entire map or you will be nuked to the ground, even if you are winning the war. This make games very repetitive as there is only one way of winning. Giving an option to defend against nuke is definitively needed IMO.

I've never been attacked if my military is roughly as strong as the other factions, only if I've fallen behind. So there is a third option, just building a big military. You don't have to use it, but it will protect against nukes by deterring attack.

In Alpha Centauri if you used the planet buster weapon. which was awesome , by the way, every faction would declare war on you. Not only did it take out everything in a radius of grids it would leave a crater filled with water so nothing could be built there again. Pandora needs penalties like this for using nukes and black holes.

Pandora nukes don't seem nowhere as devastating as SMAC(X) nukes :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJjQEoFF5Q8
Though in SMAC(X) you could build defense satellites to stop nukes.

BlueTemplar wrote:Pandora nukes don't seem nowhere as devastating as SMAC(X) nukes :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJjQEoFF5Q8
Though in SMAC(X) you could build defense satellites to stop nukes.

They were also super expensive to build (nearly as expensive as a secret project if i remember well) and they were also a unit on the map with a limited range, so you could sometime do a preemptive strike to destroy them.

Whats annoying with Pandora's nukes is that once you have build the building (which are not expensive) pouf! every 10 turns you can kill x enemy population by silo you have. There are no costs nor consequence for the owner to use them and no way to defend yourself from that other than taken other enemy cities.

Sling nukes at units in fields, it will oneshot any colonization era units I believe. Toughest unit I have tested on is a goliath mech in neutral lands which got blasted in one hit from terra salvum.

However at cities with plenty of defenses and tons of population will laugh at nukes.

Rossthegreat wrote:Sling nukes at units in fields, it will oneshot any colonization era units I believe. Toughest unit I have tested on is a goliath mech in neutral lands which got blasted in one hit from terra salvum.

However at cities with plenty of defenses and tons of population will laugh at nukes.

True, it's all relative.

Rossthegreat wrote:Sling nukes at units in fields, it will oneshot any colonization era units I believe. Toughest unit I have tested on is a goliath mech in neutral lands which got blasted in one hit from terra salvum.

However at cities with plenty of defenses and tons of population will laugh at nukes.

Once your cities get the transcendence defense building yes they get more or less untouched by nuke. Cities with only level one or two defense building will be razed if targeted by multiple nukes. That leaves a big chunk of the game, between nukes discovery and level 3 fortress, during which cities have no available defenses. It doesn't happen each game, but when it happens it sucks... Watching your cities go to dust without Beeing able to do anything about it is simply no fun.

Well you still need multiples of nukes on smaller citues in order to raze them. In fact that seem like best way for player to be hit by ai nukes, since it would incurr minimal loses to player economy and military.

Maybe a quick temporary fix would be to add an option at game start enabling/disabling nukes and black holes. In current state I would rather play without them than with.

Perhaps nukes and black holes can be modded out? I have myself absolutely no clue how to do it, but if somebody knows how to do it, please share

boulugre wrote:Maybe a quick temporary fix would be to add an option at game start enabling/disabling nukes and black holes. In current state I would rather play without them than with.

Perhaps nukes and black holes can be modded out? I have myself absolutely no clue how to do it, but if somebody knows how to do it, please share

They can be modded out, the XML files are easy to edit. I made nukes a power of 4 rather than 8 and I made black holes a power of 0 making them useless. Also I removed the damaging effects of the black hole. You need to edit the black hole operations XML and the building XML. On the building you need to change the strategy score to 0.0 this will prevent the AI from building but it does not always work so that's why you need to edit the operations XML and lower it's power to 0 and remove its effect. That way even if somehow the AI does build it the weapon will have no effect.

mjm800 wrote:
They can be modded out, the XML files are easy to edit.

Thanks, I figured that out yesterday but I am running into problems.

The manual indicates 'For modifications create a "Data/" directory with the same structure in the user
data directory outlined above. Files placed there will be loaded instead of
their distributed equivalents."

I have done that by copy pasting the original Data/ file with all its content in "/Users/<user>/Library/Application Support/Proxy Studios/Pandora/" and changing the XLM in this folder with TextEdit, but the game does not take in account my changes, it just loads the original files.

If I try to modify an XML file in the "Data/" directory in the installation directory, even with the most trivial change, like moving a tech from a tier to another, or just change the cooldown of a building, the game crashes at launch.

What am i doing wrong?

boulugre wrote:
What am i doing wrong?

It looks like your following the steps correctly.

What version are you using? I found that 1.1.2 works fine with the user files but Beta 1.1.6 did not. I would mod the files in the user directory and the game would not load them.

I use Notepa ++ (it's free). It is good because if you make a mistake the code is a different color making it easy to figure out where you went wrong. One thing out of place can crash the game. It could the editor your using is not saving things correctly. Did you copy all the original files and store them in a new folder? That way you can put everything back if the files are really messed up.

I've done some pretty extensive modding, from the factions, units, weapons, operations, pretty much everything. The game is pretty stable. I only had crashes and hiccups with the Beta, I've gone back to 1.1.2 and all is right again, although I do miss some of the improvements from the beta.

I also wondered if the Beta was the problem so I did try to switch to 1.1.2 but problem still remains. Perhaps its because I copied the entire Data/ while I was still on 1.1.6? I'll need to try to recopy the entire Data file with 1.1.2 installed.

Are you on Windows? I am on Mac, could also perhaps be an explanation?

Sham Beta can't be modded, I would also miss the changes.