Antinuke

Should Antinuke missiles cost metal and be stockpiled or not? It seems bit unfair that this building costs almost 3x time less - Trinity 8000 and Antinuke 3000 cost. One nuke cost 3240. Plus you need add cost for plane fac (if in team there is no air player or responsive air player) + at least 5 swifts. Antinuke make cost just with one interception. Of course nuke can make cost with one shoot and even end game. However Antinuke spam is ridiciously cheap. And only way to deal with them mostly is silo (and even then not every time it works). I would not be even against if nuke would be more costly if Antinuke missiles got cost. So silo could not be rushed so fast.

Yepp, you right its UI trap for low level players especially.
However i still have feelings that free antinuke missile is unfair in antis-nuke interactions. But looking at that arguments maybe its best way.
Nuke maybe also could be more interesting if it also got special effect. Something like disarm/long burning area/emp more larger radius then explosion.

On the antinuke topic I find it much more annoying that you need quite some "guessing" to know if a nuke will pass or not because of the way antinuke fires (if nuke goes "above" the anti radius afaik). So if you want to target something behind and tangent to the antinuke radius, you need to estimate very well if it will intersect or not.

Don't feel that anti cost is a problem, quite some games finish with nukes. Besides silo-s you have scythes and widows, and you can nuke defensively as well.

To make it a bit harder to defend maybe position of anti could be revealed when it intercepts a nuke.

I would like to point out, that anti nuke to nuke cover ratio is not as simple as building one antinuke to stop all nukes. The larger the map, the more area needs to be covered with antinukes before there is no viably nukeable spots left. Frontline anti nukes also risk getting stunned by shockleys fired from missile silos.

Nukes are game ending weapons and a single succesful nuke can wipe an entire front. Nukes need to be counterable.

GoogleFrog: maybe I am wrong (did not test it), but as I don't see which anti is blocking a position, it might happen that even though you disable one anti, you get intercepted by another one. Happened once - cursor is red, fire Shockley (with no los), fire nuke, another anti (which I have previously seen) intercepts nuke. A line to all anti-s blocking a position would help for example.

Anti has an insane ability to make cost, it already makes cost+ a bit with a single intercept and if it takes 3 consecutive launches(my tests show 4+...), it can nearly make 5times its cost. Anti should have a small nerf to its interception capability in either range or number of nukes interceptable. Also, make it more clear if a nuke flying overhead will be intercepted or not.

GoogleFrog: think I know what was the issue: very large map and I was not completely zoomed out. Would be nice to have a clear indication over how many anti-s your nuke is flying (number). In my previous game I would have seen 2 (instead of 1 - what I thought) and would have realized my mistake.

maby cheaper decoy launcher, like 850metal to launch 1 decoy so 2.5k metal to spoof anti and get real nuke in seems reasonable (2.5k for spoof, 8k for silo+3.2k for nuke=13.5k for a single hit.

People still use nukes, and sometimes they are successful, so what's the problem?

There are counters to Antinuke and counters to those counters. A successful nuke does not guarantee victory, it's still a substantial investment with a fixed time delay, and unless you can get build a Silo in range or for some reason they couldn't defend against Scythe/Widow/Raven you won't be able to hit the backline.

The campaign introduces players to these concepts, there is a mission where you nuke things and have to deal with Anti by whatever means you like.

8000 for Trinity and 3240 for one shot is really cheap for the reach and damage potential. Like most things in ZK, it is practically better on some maps than others, and that is fine. e.g. on a wide map opponent needs at least three Antis for full coverage, now you're even on building cost except you can still snipe armies advancing past Anti coverage and you only need to disable one to get a shot on backline. If you're on something like StormSiege it's really easy to get full Anti coverage and hard to sneak an Anti counter unless you win the ground game.

quote: Antinuke make cost just with one interception.

Trinity makes cost by nuking one EMPed Anti.

An interesting thing about nukes in team games is that a player playing the Trinity game is playing a different game from everybody else. They need to do little but reclaim, scouting, and siloing to be successful, while everybody else is trying to break robots or play tower defense. For opposing team to have proper Anti coverage and defense takes effort from multiple players and it doesn't always happen.

a single well-aimed nuke and rinity makes cost simply in the stuff destroyed, not including the reactionary cost of the antis
see B886672 10 on Comet Catcher Redux v3.1 . a single nuke (aimed by evanlegamer ) earned me the apoc award, with 14k killed (nuke+shot is 11.2k).