Nuke Balance

For a while I have thought that nukes might be having a bad effect on team games. A reasonably even game can develop until suddenly one side has a nuke and the other team soundly loses. It feels like there was a lot left in the game before it suddenly ends. The nuking side is probably a bit on the defensive but not significantly, as you would expect if they were rushing a game ender.

This is the type of game I am talking about: http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/327485

It would be easy to wave this away as people not knowing how to play. If making a nuke does not put that much of a dint in your economy then perhaps both sides should rush one. I think a reason we don't see this is that many people prefer to play the units game. So they forget about nukes.

You could also say that people just need to scout more. But to do that you have to sweep the whole map and often. A nuke can appear in 5 minutes. This is costly and then when you find a nuke you have to pay at least 5k to cover all important areas in antinukes. Then they can bomb your antinukes.

Countering nukes is expensive so you may as well rush one yourself. That is if you would not rather play the units game than maximize your chance of winning. Given that games are cut short by nukes it seems better to just nerf nukes.

A decent number of people play more large teamgames than I do. It would be useful to know what they think.


So what are nukes for? In balance we have always said that they are for creating single points of failure in lategame. So instead of having to destroy an entire base or frontline you can strike a small number of targets (the antinukes) and nuke the rest. This still seems reasonable to me. A defense line can be quite resilient to artillery but you can probably find a way to kill the protecting antinukes. A bomber force cannot clear out a base but can hit an antinuke.

Nuke balance is quite nice because there are only a few parameters:

• Silo and Antinuke cost.
• Silo and Antinuke health.
• Antinuke range.
• Antirnuke rate of fire.
• Nuke cost
• Nuke stockpile time.
• Nuke damage and AoE.

The important parameter seems to be cost. Decreasing antinuke cost would make them more spammable which would reduce their single point of failure property. This would be a change against the design so, while it would be possible, I would be very wary of such a change.

So Silo + Nuke cost seems like the important factor. A silo with one nuke costs 11k and often makes back its cost on the first impact. For that price you could buy 3 Dantes, 2 Berthas or a Bantha. Those things do not seem to be as powerful as a nuke because people automatically set up some counter while playing the units game. So cost could be increased. Too much of a cost increase brings it near Detriment and those tend to be more powerful than nukes. This is a bit of a dodgy comparison because it is not as if Detriment is finely balanced, perhaps it is too cheap.

My favourite change is stockpile time. I think significantly increasing stockpile time would have great effects.

• The launching of the nuke is pushed later into the game.
• More opportunity for nuke scouting.
• The nuker takes more of an economic loss because fixed amounts of metal lose their value as the game progresses. Even if the antinuke cost is equal to the silo + nuke cost the antinuke team would win because they get to build their antinukes with a stronger economy.
• Individual nukes would be much more important. The nukers would have to scout more carefully and pick the right spot to nuke.
• The antinuke team would not need to scramble so hard after the first nuke hits. They would have some time for recovery and be much more likely to get back in the game. Currently you are likely to get hit again 2 minutes after the first nuke so almost everything has to go to antinuke production.

I would also increase stockpile cost because 3k seems far too cheap. Individual nukes should be important. Silo cost could increase too but that seems less important.


Do nukes play well? Does stockpile time sound reasonable? How much would be good to try?

There is always an other option. (Bertha, Behemoth and all other stuff of arti units. [impaler, pillager and tremor])
And tac nuke of course.

IMO the damage and AOE of nukes would be best kept as it is. That is what makes ZK nukes awesome, compared to say the puny but spammable nukes of SC2 or some other games.

I don't really have enough experience with large team games to comment on whether nukes are currently too cheap or fast to build though.

I somewhat like the new Evo nukes which kept all their AoE but lost so much damage that they fail to destroy some important economy structures while still wr8king untold devastation due to AoE and destroying everything below that margin, most importantly defenses.

But many ZK defenses are just built to withstand nukes.

I kind of like the option to increase the stockpile time and maybe even missile cost as the second best option. It would be interesting if total cost of silo+missile didn't change, with more cost migrating into individual missiles.

note: missle stockpiling has a max buildpower of ~20metal/sec. but the unit guide says 18 m/s and 3min stockpile. what is the true cost of missle in metal and time?

For naysayers, Firepluk's elo indicates that nux rush is currently an optimal teams strategy (combined with scallop drop, but that's off topic...). I don't think that was an intended consequence, so it seems pretty clear that something should change.

+1 for increasing stockpile time (and maybe reducing build cost).

Nukes are no by any means over powered. The problem is that it exludes one player from playing the game and makes them focus on the nuke alone (considering income per player) trough a lot of the game. And once it is finished it is only fun for that player alone because of how he destroys one of the 2 sparring armies or backseat economy. Joy from that is understandable but then the rest of that player's team feels like... they have acheived nothing themselves and all praise goes to nuke guy if he succedes.
And there is a huge factor of risk too so if it gets scouted and that nuke countered by anti nuke it is a huge disapointment for a nuke player :\ and rightfully so.

quote: The problem is not nuke, the problem is games being so porcy that there is no other option.

my 2c

I still think this is just another bad manifestation of players getting a 33% personal return on the OD their energy structures generate. Eco snowball into nuke is so viable. If eco was shared properly between the players making units and the snowballing eco whore, then for a rear player amassing 10,000m would not be any easier than it is at the front. I dont feel the nuke itself is in an especially bad place, just that the players making eco at the back (not playing the unit game) still have a disproportionate amount of the teams income and rushing nuke plays to the strengths of that.

Make OD full communism the same as mexes = this problem solved.

edit: me and fred discussed this. Our mutual agreement was that OD communism would bring us back to ZK as it would give early pushes in large teamgames meaning again #JustSayin.

Adding an indicator where it'll land is one of the worst things you could do imo. Even in SC, one of the most epic things is hitting a live army with a nuke.

High-end OD has been nerfed recently even to the point that Licho complained about grids going red with no singu yet linked.