An alternative Radiation Effects model?

[Onthebeach]

Hi Developers,
there have been a number of posts about the lack of "radiation effects" in the game, and these usually start asking for weather effects to be added to the game. Now, I am not a programmer but can see that adding weather in order to simulate radiation spread could be hideously complicated.

I have a possible solution which MAY not be too hard to implement - tell me if it would be, though, so I can understand if I am asking for too much!

OK! First you have to make an arbitrary decision as to how much nuking a hex can take without being subject to radiation effect. Lets say, for this example, it has to have at least one megaton of damage, be that ONE bomb or several smaller ones. Anything smaller is not worth modeling.

Let's assume a B-52 is nuking Moscow and is delivering at least one megaton. That hex is now permanently RADIATED. It can still support population, troops and facilities but anything in that hex will henceforth accumulate damage over time (lets say 10% per month) so would either waste away or have to "spend" resources to repair the damage. Simply moving out of the radiated area would halt the progressive damage. It would make players have to decide either to keep facilities in the hex, or scrap them and relocate, either way causing lots of inconvenience and would model the disruptions a real nuke war would cause.

You would need to add a filter to the map, probably, to show RADIATED areas. Another refinement may be that seriously radiated hexes (25 megatons or more) may have a one-hex zone around them which suffers half-damage effects and is also considered RADIATED.

This system would NOT be modeling weather so would not be dynamic (less complication for the programmers), but it would none-the-less really capture the "flavour" of the effects of all-out nuclear exchanges. All the game engine would have to do is record radiated areas and calculate damage on units within them every day or month.

If BIG weapons were used there may even be a sliding scale so that progressive damage rates increased to 30% 0r 50% per month.

Chris, what do you think? Yes, I know it won't happen for Update 3 but could it make a future update or would there be too much work to justify it? I ask this because I KNOW that us players often ask the impossible and you guys can only do so much "free stuff" before the game becomes unprofitable. If you are upfront and say "great idea but it will not happen" I can live with that, as I hope the other fans can too.
And, yes, some things we ask for are stupid. In another PC game I play (a U-Boat warfare simulator) some bloke wanted the consumption of FOOD added to the game so he would have to worry about how hungry his crew were. I thought that was just a bit too much!

Anyway, you get the idea,
cheers
Kim in Australia

[Balthagor]

Hard for me to comment without chatting with our programmer. There have been some ideas floated before about adding radiation effects however "going nuclear" in the game has lots of bad effects, it is something players avoid. That makes radiation effects a low priority.

[Onthebeach]

Chris,
I agree that nukes are bad but, from what I see on this forum, there are a lot of players who do want to explore that option and push the BRB, so I think some sort of modeling would be a very welcome addition to the game.
After all, a LOT of the fun of playing SRCW is being able to explore the "what if?" avenues of alternate history. What if Kruschev had NOT blinked? What if the Berlin Airlift had failed? etc.

What do all the other players think, are nuke effects desirable or only a low priority?

cheers
Kim

[SGTscuba]

I don't think we need to change the current system really, I think its enough that if the nukes fly, plenty of people die from the explosions as well as a lot of your facilities will get destroyed. So I guess it does almost the same thing now as the effect you want in the end, aka huge distruption to your nation.

[IamBecomeDeath]

So, sorry I caught this conversation so late. But still I would like to point a few things out that I think merit some looking into.

First of all I think that a lot of thought has to be put into the nuclear strategy model. Really guys, for a Cold War simulator the whole thing is a bit too naive. I have heard many people say that in real life nuclear weapons weren't supposed "to be used", thus they don't deserve all that much effort in the game. Dead wrong! The only reason they weren't used was because neither power managed to ever bring itself in a position to wipe the other out with impunity. Maybe the US had that advantage early on but it was a democracy and simply eradicating the Eastern Bloc off the face of the earth wasn't something that was going to fly with American voters.

But in any given SRCW session, when I play as the USSR, by the 1960's, I have complete nuclear superiority in matters both quantitative and qualitative and all the motivation to use this superiority. I don't see why the real world Soviet leadership wouldn't think alike if they were in the same position.

I don't think we need to change the current system really, I think its enough that if the nukes fly...a lot of your facilities will get destroyed...aka huge distruption to your nation

I mostly agree.
Currently, the auto targetting system seems to be doing a reasonably good job. For instance I carried out a full out srike with some 300 separate weapons against the US and took out 52 out of their 53 Land Fabs, 48/49 Air Fabs, 11/11 Nav Fabs, 11/11 Missile Fabs, also I took out a good portion of their power plants and goods industries that wouldn't show in the world ledger.

But since the AI is capable of picking out those targets in the first place I'd like it to go one step further and be able to drop them into one of three target classes: military, industrial, civilian. That of course would give me, the player, the option of carrying out either counterforce or countervalue strikes, or a combination of both(all-out exchange).

Also in conjunction with the radiation effects model the OP proposed, facilities within RADIATED zones shouldn't start repairing the next day after they are struck as happens now.

lots of people die

Again not so simple.
In the same strike scenario I described before I also took out 21 out of 171 million Americans. Which, arguably, sounds sort of about right for a strike consisting of 300 weapons dispersed across a wide variety of military/industrial/civilian targets. Yet the American economy kept on humming the next day, albeit at a slightly reduced rate.

The reduction in the workforce was cancelled out by the similar reduction in places to work!
The reduction in mouths to feed was cancelled out by the reduction in production of food!
etc etc

Bottom line, 2 days after the attack the economy just shrank to about 70% of what it was before the strike and kept on going as if nothing had happened. Next thing you know the Americans invade Vladivostok. This of course borders surrealism.

Also the whole model completely disregards the impact that a massive, or even limited, nuclear attack would have on things like healthcare, education, infrastructure etc. Which would obviously be huge.

Healthcare) It has been consistently calculated that the vast majority of fatalities from a nuclear war would occur in the period of 1 to 10 years after the end of the war, not during the war. Various epidemics and lack of modern healthcare provisions as well as starvation would be the major culprits.
Education) The education infrastructrure and it's functionaries are basically blown to smithereens. Think tanks like the RAND Corproration and others have arrived to the conclusion that following a massive nuclear exchange the educational and technological level in the US would slowly but steadily drop to something like "advanced" Middle Ages(think Mongolia). New technologies wouldn't be researched and old "useless" technologies(who needs microchips in a world where ploughing the fields for corn and hunting buffalo is the main concern) would die out.
Infrastructure) Supply depots, airports & seaports, power plants, rails, roads and highways are either destroyed or fall into misuse from lack of proper maintenance.

Finally...

I very much like the idea for the radiation effect model the OP has suggested.
Only thing I would add is perhaps make it so that all RADIATED hexes can no longer produce AGRICULTURE, FRESH WATER, TIMBER.

Bottom line is I think the game(and by extension the AI) regards nuclear war as nothing more than a big conventional war were bombs cause 10000X instead of X damage. This of course is not realistic, and though I do understand it's a huge, complicated issue to configure the AI to grasp such concepts as "nuclear deterrence", "nuclear strategy" & "nuclear apocalypse" as well as it is to model the effect of said concept into the game, you can't really have a Cold-War simulator without those.
Yet I think, if any of the above was ever implemented to a satisfactory level that would make any sequel to SRCW a truly unique game and one that would never stop occupying space on my hard drive.