Turreting is Fine, And Here's Why

[Hatebi]

Normally I'm more of a "short and snappy tweet-style" poster, but I've been seeing quite a few people talking about the state of nukes and the possibility of a "nuke turret meta" and wanted to get all of my thoughts on the subject down in one place. As someone who's been turreting for over 2.5 years straight now, the discourse surrounding turreting has been the equivalent of watching someone repeatedly trying to mash a square peg into a round hole. 

There's two main concerns I hear people bring up whenever there's turret-related discourse. The first, and less seen, point is the fear of a "nuke turret alliance" that rolls around and rogues people during peace time. As cool as that'd be to witness, it's not something I expect to see on that large of a scale. There's numerous disincentives, most alliances aren't all that interested in condemning themselves to effectively fight a losing war, on their own, while everyone else is farming and growing, for an abnormally long period of time. Historically, people who have gone on nuke crusades, like HoF and CoA, have only done so for 3 to 7 weeks respectively. Go much longer and you start facing heavy member attrition. What fearmongers often forget is that vanishingly few people want to run off and throw nukes for half a year, especially outside of war season.  I feel like this one's a little obvious, but it's something I keep seeing brought up. 

The main point I've seen people make is that turreting has no counters. While I personally love it when people have this mindset and make no attempts whatsoever to impede me, it's sadly not the case. Numerous forms of counter play exists for all forms of turreting, alliances just can't be asked to put in the slightest amount of effort above what they know works against traditional raiders. 

If you really want to focus on damaging a nuke build, you've got multiple ways to go about it. The tried and true method still works, slot the turret in question with 3 raids and go to work. All you've got to do is switch your counters (and preferably whoever's been hit) over to Tactician. It takes virtually 0 effort on your part and costs essentially nothing to do, as a turret is not going to want to waste their bombs in raid type wars over the attrition types they've got active. Will you get the same instant gratification and visible damage of dragging a milled up high city raider down into the pits of Hades? No, but if you want to deal with someone who deals low, consistent damage, you're going to have to be okay with doing the same. 

But maybe you do want something a little more flashy? Something that'll hit a little heavier? Luckily for you, there's a second option that's been staring you in the face the entire time. While nukes are the main weapon of a turret, they're also it's biggest weakness. Now, most people will hear the idea of throwing nukes at someone with 500 infra and think you're either crazy or incompetent. The thing is, you're not nuking their infra, you're nuking their improvements. People have talked about the buffs nukes have received a lot, but a certain change seems to always slip by unnoticed: the buffed improvement destruction. A base nuke destroys 4 random improvements, while a guidance sat boosted nuke will level 5 of them. If you send in 3 counters in raid type wars, they'll be able to launch a total of 12 nukes while receiving minimal damage themselves. How many improvements is that in total? With guidance sat, 48 to 60 improvements in just one round of wars, depending on if the target has VDS or not. Even in the worst case scenario where none of your guys has guidance sat and the turret has VDS, you're still able to hit up to 36 improvements in a single round.

People who are sitting at 0 infra and have absolutely nothing to destroy are even easier. They're not producing anything at all and have to run off of a stockpile. This means they're permanently on a timer, both in their individual wars since they're only going to be carrying so much on them at a time and in the long run since they likely aren't replenishing very many of their resources by throwing nukes. Slot them with raid type wars on the Pirate policy and you can sap considerably amounts of their loot on-hand. Their lack of a nuke build makes them vulnerable to perma blockades, letting you completely shut them down if you can pull one off for long enough. 

Some people might say that slotting a turret and trying to spam nukes or get them in a perma blockade is too much effort. This is a totally fair opinion to have. As an alliance, it's your choice on how you want to deal with turrets. If your chosen method is "doing nothing in-game while complaining to everyone who'll listen and begging for them to be nerfed", so be it. I just think that's a little lame. 

Want to cap this off with a callout to @Buorhann specifically since he's been one of the main proponents of what I'm talking about. I tried to level with you in DMs, but you've been talking about this "nuke meta" constantly for weeks now. If you really think an alliance of nuke turrets running around and rogueing people left and right would be game breaking, why not show us? I think you know just as well as I do that you'd fracture your community and lose most of your guys after a few months all to do less damage than you could have done in a traditional war. If you believe in this so passionately, I'd love to see you put your money where your mouth is. 

[KindaEpicMoah]

[RandomNoobster]

I agree with the points raised by Hatebi and I just want to highlight the disincentives at play. There are two ways to nuke turret; with a nuke stockpile and without a nuke stockpile. When we nuked TKR we had stockpiled nukes for over 3 months. Many of us had over 100 nukes and missiles. The cost of purchasing and maintaining all these nukes was very high. We spent over half of the would-be alliance-wide income on nuke and missile upkeep. Not to mention the cost of the weapons themselves. All of this, just to have 3 nukes spied away every day. We were still able to launch at least 5 nukes daily, but it's not great with regards to the ratio of money spent and damage dealt. 

Nuking without a stockpile can be a lot more economically viable, as it can be performed without months of paying billions in upkeep. You will, however, not be able to do the same amount of damage in the same amount of time. There is also the need to manage your resource stockpile such that you can afford a nuke (or two now that we have new projects) every day. This requires more effort and planning from individual members than mindlessly throwing 5 nukes every day, and will consequently be harder for an entire alliance to keep up for longer than a month or two. 

[Anarchist Empire]

VDS already is the in-game counter, so I agree. It's not broken. People who don't invest in that and wonder what the counter is, it's VDS.

Nuke Turret nations are also highly limited in how much damage they can do, but can get a lot off if someone has bloated infra I guess. (People shouldn't be secure in their infra being indestructible if they buy a ton, regardless of how much protection they think they have.)

Would imbalance the game also if making it harder. Arrgh nuke turrets because they felt the need to adapt in dealing with alliances which band together. Game would be boring if everyone was just NAP & impossible for nations to survive without joining the hegemony. I raid to make money, nuke turreting is just more backup defensive against forces where I'm out matched conventionally. Gives a way to fight back.

As mentioned by previous guy, unless stocked up limited to one per day. If more they can be spy oped. (With 25% chance of that failing if someone makes their nation to be able to defend against nukes.) So plenty of counters exist for those who use them. I think whether the odds on VDS are as good as they should be is maybe debatable, but definitely better than nothing.

Nations should be able to specialize into different roles, rather than one cookie cutter way to fight.

Edited May 9, 2024 by Anarchist Empire

[Rageproject]

I think having a problem with nuke turretting is as silly as being anti-raiding. It’s part of the gameplay. Sure, it sucks when you’re the one getting hit. But like Hatebi said, there’s some ways to deter and defend.

The only “issue” I see is missiles and nukes are extremely cheap relative to the potential destruction they can cause when used in the nuke turretting — more than previously. It would be fair to increase the cost to produce them slightly. From a logical standpoint, requiring missile project to be able to get Nuke project makes sense in military development too.

But at the end of the day, nothing in the game will ever be perfect. With every situation someone will develop a strategy to exploit or counter it. And that’s not a bad thing. 

[Sir Scarfalot]

I agree, nuke turreting is fine. And I'm saying this as someone that's been on both sides of the issue. Counter-nuking and raid counters are good ways to counterplay against turrets, while not being so powerful as to invalidate a playstyle that is vitally important for the long-term health of the game. Without the possibility of turreting, there's no incentive for the winners of wars to stop holding down their rivals. That leaves open the possibility of IQ-style shenanigans, and I shouldn't need to elaborate on why we need to avoid that.

[Anarchist Empire]

34 minutes ago, Sir Scarfalot said:

I agree, nuke turreting is fine. And I'm saying this as someone that's been on both sides of the issue. Counter-nuking and raid counters are good ways to counterplay against turrets, while not being so powerful as to invalidate a playstyle that is vitally important for the long-term health of the game. Without the possibility of turreting, there's no incentive for the winners of wars to stop holding down their rivals. That leaves open the possibility of IQ-style shenanigans, and I shouldn't need to elaborate on why we need to avoid that.

When one side is morally destroyed, it's a curb stomp. If they can nuke at least, they can do some damage. Enemy isn't always wanting to be nice if the other side can't put up a fight.

Edited May 9, 2024 by Anarchist Empire

[Buorhann]

4 hours ago, Hatebi said:

Want to cap this off with a callout to @Buorhann specifically since he's been one of the main proponents of what I'm talking about. I tried to level with you in DMs, but you've been talking about this "nuke meta" constantly for weeks now. If you really think an alliance of nuke turrets running around and rogueing people left and right would be game breaking, why not show us? I think you know just as well as I do that you'd fracture your community and lose most of your guys after a few months all to do less damage than you could have done in a traditional war. If you believe in this so passionately, I'd love to see you put your money where your mouth is. 

Yes, you did DM me and we've had a pleasant brief conversation about it.  It still didn't hit all the points, let alone this particular post of yours is missing some points as well.  I'm not completely oblivious to countering "turrets" or anything of that sort, let alone some of the insane costs of doing it.  The problem lies in how the design team is balancing the game.

With the way how the balance is - countering current self-sufficient builds of turret nations is the most difficult in the game.  Since 2015, I think it's actually the most difficult.  Not difficult as in "Declare Raid, swap Tactician, etc." but as in the cost and dedication to it.  It's absurd.  Everything else has an effective counter.  Turrets do not.  It's a huge time and cost investment to do it, and arguably almost impossible despite all of your words here.

Do I think an AA is running around turreting and terrorizing the game at the moment?  No.  Has it been done before in a war?  Yes, not optimally but it's been done a few times.

>I'd love to see you put your money where your mouth is

[Buorhann]

4 hours ago, Hatebi said:

Historically, people who have gone on nuke crusades, like HoF and CoA

Also this made me chuckle.

[Anarchist Empire]

Wasn't singularity mostly nuke turreting last war & still was mostly a curb stomb? Just let them keep doing damage. Letting people do damage, if you want to restrict that during peace when you want to just build up; has negative effects in wars worth fighting also.

[Hatebi]

51 minutes ago, Buorhann said:

With the way how the balance is - countering current self-sufficient builds of turret nations is the most difficult in the game.  Since 2015, I think it's actually the most difficult.  Not difficult as in "Declare Raid, swap Tactician, etc." but as in the cost and dedication to it.  It's absurd.  Everything else has an effective counter.  Turrets do not.  It's a huge time and cost investment to do it, and arguably almost impossible despite all of your words here.

You seem hung up on this "it's unbalanced" line. Personally, I think it's extremely well balanced, even if it's unintentional. 

Turreting is all about low yet sustained damage output. It's not like proper raiding where you go in, blow up their infra, clap their units, take their loot and salt their land so that nothing may ever grow again. Realistically you're blasting 2 cities and then getting beiged, 3 if you're using missiles. I think it's both fair and fitting that the counter play to a slow, methodical way of dealing damage is also slow and methodical. 

In response to a point Kastor made in that other thread, if you're trying to destroy every single improvement someone has, yeah it's going to take a while. That's not the kinda goal you should be setting and it's not what you need to accomplish to effectively counter a turret. All you need to do is to destroy enough of someone's stuff to either get them to leave you alone or reduce the amount of bombs they can support. Even an extremely optimized build will struggle to support 2 nukes and 3 missiles a day if you can knock off enough improvements. 

It seems like you only focus on the cost endured by the turreted party while rarely acknowledging what it costs the turret. If you're committing to the bit long term, you're hemorrhaging money. You're giving up months of time you could have spent farming/raiding and you're absolutely going to be falling behind growth wise. Opportunity costs aside, you're spending about 17M a day just on your bombs at current market prices. Taking in the bits of loot you bleed to counters, you'll often find yourself losing money while turreting. I say this as someone who built to 2.65k just to make my build as cracked as possible. The handful of other turrets you see running around are running far less efficient builds that will fold to even less damage.

Don't forget every raider's best friend: burnout. It's a story as old as the game itself, a raider pops off for half a year to a year and then instantly burns out and quits the game. Turreting yields little visible progress like raiding does and really doesn't benefit the turret very much if at all. Imo this is one of the #1 reasons why fearmongering over a swarm of long-term nuke turrets is a bit silly. People are not built for that and will quickly burnout. 

Taking all that into account, this whole discourse feels a bit silly. I believe this play style does far more good for the health of the game than bad. Dedicating all of this time and effort into trying to get it nerfed when the reality of the situation shows it's really not that big of a deal makes it feel like some of y'all want a hard counter rather than actual healthy counter play, which we already have available. 
 

[Buorhann]

34 minutes ago, Hatebi said:

In response to a point Kastor made in that other thread, if you're trying to destroy every single improvement someone has, yeah it's going to take a while. That's not the kinda goal you should be setting and it's not what you need to accomplish to effectively counter a turret. All you need to do is to destroy enough of someone's stuff to either get them to leave you alone or reduce the amount of bombs they can support. Even an extremely optimized build will struggle to support 2 nukes and 3 missiles a day if you can knock off enough improvements. 

It seems like you only focus on the cost endured by the turreted party while rarely acknowledging what it costs the turret. If you're committing to the bit long term, you're hemorrhaging money. You're giving up months of time you could have spent farming/raiding and you're absolutely going to be falling behind growth wise. Opportunity costs aside, you're spending about 17M a day just on your bombs at current market prices. Taking in the bits of loot you bleed to counters, you'll often find yourself losing money while turreting. I say this as someone who built to 2.65k just to make my build as cracked as possible. The handful of other turrets you see running around are running far less efficient builds that will fold to even less damage.
 

I've been running the numbers on it.  You're not completely wrong, but that's the part of it that makes it so damn difficult.

You'd have to pick a build for Missiles or Nukes.  Can't do both (Obviously you can if you buy the RSS for the other).  For example, Africa is a good one to have your nation if you want to build a self-sufficient nuke nation.

You get $2mil daily bonus, $2mil baseball, $2mil paid ads, plus color bonus ($125k a tick if you're on Green, Pink, White, Maroon).  Plus if you're raiding inactives at the same time.

Financially, you're covered no matter which build you go with on the daily even while blockaded.  The only counter if you go with a minimal build is if someone targets your RSS Production.  If I ran the numbers correctly, you can do this at 16 cities reliably.  If you're larger than that, it gets easier to build a self-sufficient turret nation.  Way easier.  Even at low Infra, you're not running enough of a deficit to stop building your daily nuke/missile.

So hitting high Infra targets AND forcing them to invest enough time and finances into killing your Imps...


Everybody keeps bringing up growth but no one tells me why growth is so important.  Literally the only reason to grow is to fight conventional military against likesized players, but you can do that at every tier of the game.

Sidenote:  Retooling your nation for self-sufficient nuke/missiling also doubles for having resources while fighting conventionally.

Edited May 10, 2024 by Buorhann

[Shiho Nishizumi]

10 minutes ago, Buorhann said:

You get $2mil daily bonus, $2mil baseball, $2mil paid ads, plus color bonus ($125k a tick if you're on Green, Pink, White, Maroon).  Plus if you're raiding inactives at the same time.

It's worth noting that ads are disabled at the moment (trying to watch the full 2m worth without a script would be obnoxious either way).

[Buorhann]

8 minutes ago, Shiho Nishizumi said:

It's worth noting that ads are disabled at the moment (trying to watch the full 2m worth without a script would be obnoxious either way).

Baseball isn't capped at $2mil either, it just drops off after that.  In any case, there's enough out there to build and attack with things that cannot be countered other than a percentage chance if the nation has VDS/ID.

[Hatebi]

24 minutes ago, Buorhann said:

You get $2mil daily bonus, $2mil baseball, $2mil paid ads, plus color bonus ($125k a tick if you're on Green, Pink, White, Maroon).  Plus if you're raiding inactives at the same time.

Small point, but 2M from baseball is generally not going to happen. It's technically 100% possible, though in my experience, baseball has never been more dead than it is right now. Having a buddy to run away games for you is mandatory if you want to hit 2M in a reasonable amount of time and even then you're going to be grinding for quite a while. 

Rewarded ads isn't that much of a blast either. Only factoring in the 3 minute break between ads and not the ads themselves, you're looking at an hour and 15 minutes to watch all 25. You can refresh the page when the timer's low to bring it down to 0, though in my experience the game will often punish you for that by bringing it back up all the way to 180 seconds. The best part? Sometimes they just don't work. There's a reason the page has a giant disclaimer, that whole system is held together with chewed gum and a dream. 

The stuff you listed is also well beyond the reach of the average player. Many alliances struggle to get their members to throw bombs from a stockpile of resources for all that long. Ask them to sit at their desk for over an hour, dual wielding baseball on the main monitor and rewarded ads on the second while making sure to never, ever miss a single day of logging in, less they break their 2M log in bonus. They'll have some choice words to tell ya. 

Do we really think that if someone is willing to put in that much effort into lobbing a few bombs a day they don't deserve to? Look at what the average farmer does, compare and contrast. Farmers log in like 2-3 times a week to buy uranium and make money hand over fist. Turrets are out here logging in every day, grinding more than an old school runescape player. At what point do you just gotta hand it to us and let us do our funny little acts of terrorism? How much grass do we have to avoid here?

edit: Almost forgot to mention, rewarded ads have a habit of not finishing or playing properly if you don't actively have the tab open, at least in my experience. If you don't have a second monitor, you're going to be suffering. 

Edited May 10, 2024 by Hatebi

[Shiho Nishizumi]

8 minutes ago, Buorhann said:

Baseball isn't capped at $2mil either, it just drops off after that.  In any case, there's enough out there to build and attack with things that cannot be countered other than a percentage chance if the nation has VDS/ID.

I just checked and apparently uBlock Origin just hid my rewarded ad button, so never mind on ads being disabled.

I'd say that pirate turrets probably have an easier time of affording those nukes/missiles, given peacetime context and being able to hit whoever. It's a good deal more difficult as someone in a conventional war because of restricted targets and those being built up militarily (raiding isn't a feasible source of cash, in other words).

[Mystery Incorporated]

As somone who recently became a nuker/pirate I managed to make a self sufficient build that makes uranium , gasoline and cash everyday to allow me to atleast make a nuke however I cannot make aluminium, even if I were to switch to africa I'd need to buy a decent amount of infra somewhere atleast 2.5k or more to get a cracked build and like @Hatebisaid if a lot of people do destroy these improvements it becomes Hard to self sustain yourself, realistically only option there is are beiging inactives and getting the acquired resources.

[Buorhann]

8 minutes ago, Mystery Incorporated said:

As somone who recently became a nuker/pirate I managed to make a self sufficient build that makes uranium , gasoline and cash everyday to allow me to atleast make a nuke however I cannot make aluminium, even if I were to switch to africa I'd need to buy a decent amount of infra somewhere atleast 2.5k or more to get a cracked build and like @Hatebisaid if a lot of people do destroy these improvements it becomes Hard to self sustain yourself, realistically only option there is are beiging inactives and getting the acquired resources.

2400ish Infra is what I'm getting depending on how you want to build other Imps (I included 5 Barracks, 1 Naval for the build just to hit raiding inactives).  Think you can go as low as 2100 at the bare minimal, but if a Imp gets removed - you're screwed.

The bonus' to production kinda screw up figuring the perfect build, and it's not considering resource projects.

12 minutes ago, Hatebi said:

Small point, but 2M from baseball is generally not going to happen. It's technically 100% possible, though in my experience, baseball has never been more dead than it is right now. Having a buddy to run away games for you is mandatory if you want to hit 2M in a reasonable amount of time and even then you're going to be grinding for quite a while. 

Takes about 10mins if you have a buddy, which if you're doing this as a group - easy.  If you're solo and a introvert, definitely hard.

13 minutes ago, Hatebi said:

Rewarded ads isn't that much of a blast either. Only factoring in the 3 minute break between ads and not the ads themselves, you're looking at an hour and 15 minutes to watch all 25. You can refresh the page when the timer's low to bring it down to 0, though in my experience the game will often punish you for that by bringing it back up all the way to 180 seconds. The best part? Sometimes they just don't work. There's a reason the page has a giant disclaimer, that whole system is held together with chewed gum and a dream. 

IIRC, there's a script that makes rewarded ad bonus easier, but you're right - the payment doesn't always work.

Edited May 10, 2024 by Buorhann

[Buorhann]

22 minutes ago, Hatebi said:

At what point do you just gotta hand it to us and let us do our funny little acts of terrorism? How much grass do we have to avoid here?

I'm not looking to stop raiding or nerf nukes.  I'm looking to find balance.  Everything but this has a reliable and effective counter.

-At least $4mil a day in cash bonus'
-250% updeclare change
-Protection from spy ops the day they're built
-Improved Imp destruction plus projects if you get them
-Didn't they get a reduction in RSS requirements at some point too?

This particular area of the game has been buffed so much with little to no balancing to counter those "positive" changes.

I've been in this game so long that I've seen every military unit, spy operation, etc altered multiple times, both good and bad.  This one has just been good, over and over.

 

(Now that I look it over, the only "balance" that happened was the recent buff to VDS - which was long overdue)

Edited May 10, 2024 by Buorhann

[Hatebi]

13 minutes ago, Buorhann said:

-At least $4mil a day in cash bonus'
-250% updeclare change
-Protection from spy ops the day they're built
-Improved Imp destruction plus projects if you get them
-Didn't they get a reduction in RSS requirements at some point too?

These changes have been a response to the increasingly large size of the games whales. Back in the mid 2010s when a "whale" was the size of a mid tier nation today a single nuke and missile a day weren't that bad. We aren't in the mid 2010s anymore. Whales today are easily c40+. A nuke and a missile a day isn't going to cut it when people have way more cities now then they did back then. 

As for the improved imp destruction, this is equal parts curse as it is a blessing, as addressed in the initial post. 

Nukes/missiles have not received any sort of RRS discount, at least in my time playing the game. 

13 minutes ago, Buorhann said:

This particular area of the game has been buffed so much with little to no balancing to counter those "positive" changes.

VDS has had it's chance to block increased and reduces imp destruction. There's also the (relatively) newly added fallout shelter. I do personally think that fallout shelter should receive a large buff as a compromise for all the buffs that have been added in the new update for whales who can build the projects. 

Edited May 10, 2024 by Hatebi

[Buorhann]

18 minutes ago, Hatebi said:

Nukes/missiles have not received any sort of RRS discount, at least in my time playing the game. 

VDS has had it's chance to block increased and reduces imp destruction. There's also the (relatively) newly added fallout shelter. I do personally think that fallout shelter should receive a large buff as a compromise for all the buffs that have been added in the new update for whales who can build the projects. 

Yeah, I edited in the VDS change in my previous reply.  I swear to god I've seen a resource reduction in the past to them, now I'm searching through all the game changes.

I do agree on the Fallout Shelter.

[Avatar Patrick]

Nuke turreting is fine the way it is. It's part of the game and the damage done to conventional alliances is minimal in the long run. That being said, I'm not completely sold that countering a nuke turret and nuking them back is worthwhile. I ran some calculations with op's nation specifically and I found that the cost of her rebuild from 250 infra to 1k is about 52 million. That's quite a bit until you realize the cost of using 12 nukes against her is $86,730,000 at current market prices. Even if she rebuilds after every round it still costs the alliance more to counter. Again though, it's not really a big deal. We're not going to get a full alliance of hatebis anytime soon lol

[Mayor]

I have to agree with Buorhann that the nuke turreting strat is a bit overpowered. Nukes are very easy to buy at least 1 per day, maybe a bit more difficult to buy 2 but that project costs over a billion anyways. After being destroyed in a war and losing my infra, I can easily survive forever with 900 infra which is easy to buy back to. I make like 20m a day still at that level which is enough for rebuy + nuke + missile. I was raiding for over a year doing exactly this and hitting micro alliances like High Table and whatever alliance firewof was in.

I have no interest in buying cities while raiding cause at 37 cities I just don't see the point so all cash can go to my military and warchest. If I was not also using my military/tanks etc to crush people and only using nukes I could honestly still buy cities no problem. Although my improvements are ideal, at 37 cities and 2 nuclear power plants, in order to improvement wipe me requires multiple nukes or an insane dedication to taking me down which in my entire time in this game (2015) has never been done. I remember Seabasstion making a post in Game Suggestions about people using low tier builds to have a massive military advantage and even after the Arrgh nerfs (population military caps) taking down a militarized low infra build is still extremely difficult and unrewarding. Usually people give up after 1 round or try to cycle and fail cause I can declare like 9 wars now. And if a city gets improvement wiped (by losing 2 nuke power plants) that is just 1 city out of 37. I just buy that city to 900 infra and fill with military buildings, next time under blockade and my cash is in danger of being looted I just rebuild that city. With only nuke turreting this is not even a concern, you can nuke forever and no one can actually stop you. The only thing that can stop someone would be the raider actually giving up due to boredom as if they produce uranium and even a tiny amount of cash + bonus can buy nuke + missiles every day.

Multiple times I have been raiding, not just nuke turreting but that is always my strategy if I lose military, and after a year of raiding have only really lost a few improvements ,usually useless ones and not important ones like power plants or airports, and have never been economically forced to stop raiding. If you were only using nukes and no military you would have high income and low expenses, meaning improvements are not even really necessary as you should make enough money to buy nukes + missiles no matter what (bonus/infrastructure/raids). Also only nukes can take out power plants so conventional military is really useless when trying to stop nukes as there are just too many improvements to destroy. The only downside is that I don't grow as much as farming nations, stagnation damages me more than any alliance actually could.

Anyways I love using nukes (288 launched btw not much but a good amount) so I want them to stay the way they are (and honestly 1 single nation cannot really harm an entire alliance with nukes) but maybe it is time to make military attacks destroy some more improvements to force people to rebuild more often and not stay permanently low infrastructure or make nukes more expensive to build (honestly maybe we want more raiders tho cause this game is kinda stagnant anyways, just my opinion). Anyways either way, post next war once I lose my infrastructure, I am 1000% going to raid and use nukes. I just bought guidance sat for this exact purpose. I can only imagine how fun it will be to use nukes and missiles to both wreck high infra nations and destroy improvements of those pesky low infra counter raiders.

[Mayor]

7 hours ago, Hatebi said:

Small point, but 2M from baseball is generally not going to happen. It's technically 100% possible, though in my experience, baseball has never been more dead than it is right now. Having a buddy to run away games for you is mandatory if you want to hit 2M in a reasonable amount of time and even then you're going to be grinding for quite a while. 

I have made millions off of my bud @Who Me who always had my back in baseball. Literally saved my behind multiple times allowing me to make enough to buy missiles or rebuild. Just takes a few minutes, never even messaged him ever I think. We just understood each other. So yeah I think making 2m is not that much of a stretch or would take too long.

With rewarded ads, all the new bonuses, many more nations to raid, more cities to have money etc. I think making the money for nukes is laughably easy. A full rebuild is another story but just nukes/missiles is easy for sure.

Edit: Also Hatebi, I looked at your city build and I have seriously underestimated wind power. 500$(2000$) per day operational cost, for 4 improvement slots, gives me multiple extra chances for a city to survive losing a power plant for extremely low cost. No longer need to fear the double power plant destroying nuke. Should have started using them ages ago. Thanks.

Edited May 10, 2024 by Mayor
typos

[Who Me]

Once again, the "design" team is trying to "balance" a part of the game that affects a very small subset of the game because they whine the most while continuing to ignore things that affect every single player. Things like the broken assed spy system and the fact that ships have zero defense against planes. Why don't you fix those things before worrying about nuke turrets? Fix shit that matters people.