If the nuke acted like a nuke, it would be overpowered, people would fire it into a barracks and cause death to respawning players. Not to mention the size of the missile to have it carry a large enough payload to cause fallout.
Increase nuke research even more and purchase price and in return make the nuke an end game weapon that wipes out 1/4 of the map. That is, big ass area effect and damage. If a team can build a nuke then they obviously have the resources to win the game anyhow and the other team took too long to do anything about it. Oh, and to make it interesting, instead of a tank missile (which kinda is silly anyhow), just have a new building (missile silo) and let the commander be the one that fires the darn thing away. Once again - just make it an end-game weapon.
-_- Yes, the commander should have research options that let him click and wipe out the entire map, just for Lol's. If it weren't called nuclear warhead, but rather "Really Effing Huge Rocket That Moves Slower Than Your Mom But Carries 10,000 Tons Of TnT", would you stop wanting it to blow up the entire map?
I don't think so. Because then people would just rush paper heavies and then the nukes and buy some heavies and blow the whole map to oblivion. GG indeed. :p
currently, it's sort of a direct-fire variant of the artillery, and i like that concept... it adds another option instead of artillery as a turtle-buster. If it could be improved while maintaining this concept, I'd be down with that. Or not. Frankly, imo, the less nuke, the better- so I'm clearly biased against them. Take that in consideration.
If a nuke could hit a turret on the ground at the closest an NF tank could set it's crosshairs low enough to target it, and hit it 90% of the time (this is nearly point blank), I think that would be enough to balance it. As it is, you could miss turrets point bank as much as 60% of the time. ( not to mention it's nearly possible to hit your own tank directly with an unlucky shot).
Any nuclear explosion has fallout, tactical nukes (like these) would still have fallout, just not hundreds or more years of it. A tactical nuke would devistate an area, but not a country. The most realistic nuke ive ever seen or used in a source game has a "radial radiation damage" system, namely you have to have an unobstructed path between you and ground zero to actually recieve radiation damage. This means (with current barracks designs) that anyone in the barracks is completely safe. Also, non open air seats would be safe from the radiation, unless some researchable radition shielded lead armor upgrade was added to make non upgraded vehicles suseptable to radiation.
Just get over the fact that the name is nuke. Everyone wears armor made out of lead or something. Okay?
Because in characteristic it is very different from Empire's other plasma weapons. Just call it a bunker buster?
What about fission motor though? Where will it go when nukes turn to plasma and get shuffled over into (the very neglected) superheated materials category? Maybe just leave it category-less like Bio Diesel and just increase the research time...? That would maybe encourage researching it, or just rename it to Superconductor Engine, put it in the Superheated Materials category and rename it to "Thermal Science" or even "Thermodynamics", though that would be slightly inaccurate...?
Wouldn't it just be sensible to call it an advanced HE missile and be done with it? Make up some stuff about how advanced physics research allows weapons manufacturers to pack massive amounts of explosives into a small space, and then say this makes it heavy, hence the slowness.
Nukes are just big boomers that do insta damage over a large area. /thread If you have a problem, GTFOI. It makes enough sense for 98% of the people who play.
Well it's entirely possible that the new research tree will rename, relocate, or remove them. So who knows?
