Should Strategic Missile Submarine be able to make AntiNukes?

Should Strategic Missile Submarines be able to make AntiNukes? This can add more strategies in defending navy from nukes. Also a way to hide your smd if water is near your base. Maybe the cost of the AntiNukes could be cheaper and quicker to build as the Strategic Missile Submarine is more vulnerable. What are your thoughts

Never Fear, A Geek is Here!

It's an interesting idea at first but upon some brief thought, contrary to what you say, it seems incredibly strong as it is:

  1. harder to scout - compared to a regular anti-nuke, which only requires any unit with vision to see it once for you see the building, you need a unit with water vision (which only a few have) over the sub and you need to be watching right as your unit has the sub in its water vision, as it won't leave the unit/strategic icon behind since it's a unit, not a building.

  2. mobile - compared to the regular anti-nuke which is fixed in its location, the player launching the nuke cannot determine what the effective range of the anti-nuke is with this anti-nuke sub because it can move to cover multiple locations: the theoretical coverage is the radius of the anti-nuke extending beyond the entire body of water.

  3. versatile - it's literally a nuke + anti-nuke combined in one as per your suggestion, if you make one of these subs and your opponent has a nuke, your opponent has to react with an anti-nuke of his own unless he wants to risk getting nuked while you can just make an anti-nuke with the sub and be up 11k mass for free...

  4. probably going to be harder to snipe than the regular anti-nuke because you either need to use torp bombers, which are just a lot worse than strats, or groundfire strats, which likely can be dodged and is easily countered by the presence of a few sams/hover flak/asf because you need to keep t3 air scouts over the sub in order to ground fire a moving target that's dodging accurately.

If anything, it should cost far, far, far more, not less, than a regular anti nuke for it to even be remotely balanced. In general, I've been surprised by a nuke from a nuke sub far more frequently than from a stationary nuke, and I expect that will be the case with this. I am firmly against adding anti-nukes to existing subs for the above reasons.

I dont think its possible to have one unit make two types of counted projectile, you could have nukes or anti nuke, not both. I like this idea however the only way i see of making it work would be like the different versions an sacu, a nuke sub and an anti nuke sub.

A nuclear missile is a long-range missile that takes a long time to launch and is slow to get up to max speed.

The anti-nuke is like a bullet that flies out quickly to intercept the nuke.

The two projectiles are completely different. So thematically it doesn't make sense for the same unit to fire both.

It doesn't make sense that a sub could be underwater and fire an anti-nuke projectile through the water that would still be fast enough to intercept the nuclear missile.

could always only allow fire above water, would also balance better so its easier to see and kill

u just raise ur sub when u hear nuke launch and then submerge any time other than that

Moved to Balance Discussion

I like the idea of having some sort of naval or aquatic antinuke, but I largely agree with arch's above points regarding the balance of putting it on a nuke sub. So, perhaps we should discuss adding a relatively expensive mobile anti-nuke, but it might make more sense to allow some form of stationary SMD's in water.

pfp credit to gieb

No new units

So maybe the smd could be aquatic, like sams?

Hasn't there been a very long thread years ago about naval antinuke that concluded that this would be a bad idea?

Yes, and not only one but few over the years. Still, movable SMD is just OP same as allowing one to build it on water as that gives you way to many opportunities to abuse single SMD to cover more than half of the map.

You guys just scared to out of possibilities to nuke enemy base by focusing land smd by 99999 bombers.

I am voting for adding this into faf to flip over old suck tactics 😄

Amazing reasoning, showcases why these things don't get left to votes.

@ftxcommando faf is not about stability anyway. Old balance team did whatever they want

What structure of organization is more predisposed to stability in action and thought process:
The singular executive enacting what he deems necessary with either no or little regard for feedback

or

The conglomeration of meritocratically established people that were put in their position due to holding a broadly similar set of axiomatic beliefs that would make them work with the rest of the group?

The "old balance team" was the former btw.

Democracys tend to be more stable than dictatorships. And hugely more effective. And as @Eternal well said, stability at the cost of everything else, is not the objective. And of course, meritocratical systems tend to be hugely more effective too.

Concerning antinuke. I agree with words of @archsimkat. But I point out, that not having mobile antinuke, seems to make many massheavy maps totally turtle type (some DualCap, Astro?). Once your army or navy value is bigger then value of nukes neccessaire to destroy that army or navy (so that army/navy cant dodge those nukes). It forces the games to go into "build big gun, everything else does not matter" style. Having mobile antinuke could add lots of possibilitys and gameplay. And reduce turtle-eco-build-big-gun, type of games.

I am not talking antinuke on nukesub, but maybe new unit that could go on land and water. More expensive than static one of course, but maybe reduce the price of static anti nuke a little?

The thing about nukes is that they both punish robotic play where opponent keeps scaling without scouting and also forces opponents to take action on some maps because of spread out bases. On many maps 1 nuke can force up to like 4 SMDs. This also forces bp on the SMDs so it slows down scale elsewhere.

With a mobile anti nuke a nuke is no longer a macro tool but rather an air’s win more tool because it’s simply impossible to nuke anything faster than a mobile anti nuke can be loaded into a transport and block the nuke on the passage to a base. It means that a scaling opponent will always counter a nuke as long as his team has air, which they will since he has focused on scaling.

Nuking armies and navies is a major hail mary move because they can both move out of the way and also it destroys all the reclaim which you would likely need in order to come back from the situation.

With multiple nukes spread out and narrow terrain, you can not move out of the way, as I already pointed out. And this type of gamers are not looking "to come back from the situation". They are doing it on purpose. 4 nukes at 60k mass (not considering launchers), against 20 experimentals (or something else) at 400-700k mass... People play like that in purpose on some maps. This is the actual balance that makes it like that.

It is possible to have mobile antinuke that is not transportable. So you cant move it fast by air in front of nukes path.