The Commander Series Forum

Has anyone tried to figure out how to do this? I've had a few ideas that haven't gone too far. Mostly I'm trying to manage it in terms of making it not be a "Well, you're winning, so now I drop The big one on you, so there." Breakpoint penalties for both sides, as well as a command chain to get release authority are things I've been working on. Anyone have any ideas with which to guide me?

Treat as a heavy orbital bombardment - that's some pretty serious damage already! Or double the area, double the dice in the inner radius, normal dice outside, quadruple the points. Call in via CO only.

Or assume everyone remembered their nuclear dampers and nukes are irrelevant!

How about some effects for the EMP from an airburst?

You could maybe apply a blanket -1 to command rolls, or double the distance penalty/halve the distance for the -1 for distance. Would be simple...

Or say everyone gets the benefits of stealth.

I'd use an existing mechanic or one close as possible to keep rules clutter down.

You make a good point that orbital bombardments are pretty powerful as is. Hmm. I want nukes to be as horrible as they are in real life, but I also don't want them popping off like the Fourth of July.

A more refined idea of a procedure:
1) Tacnukes require a CO and at least one FAO. Spotting the nuke requires a full command action for both - the CO must spend its whole command action requesting and coordinating the fire. The warhead arrives at the end of the turn.
2) When the warhead detonates, it immediately produces a battlefield-wide EMP that generates a -2 command penalty for the next turn, effecting ALL units, friendly and enemy alike. EMP penalties are cumulative with tech level penalties (totaling -3 for low tech, -1 for high tech). The penalty diminishes by one for each successive turn until it reaches zero. I'm considering 'EMP-Hardening' as a unit attribute to reduce this on units so equipped, but haven't worked that out yet.
3) The warhead's beaten zone is 30cm. in radius. Within 5 cm, everything is vaporized except Massive units, which take 12d artillery hits. This counts as disabling damage, if you're using Macuniama's special Massive Units buff. Within 5-10cm, all units receive 9d strikes, and infantry are instantly killed. Within 10-20cm, all units receive 6d strikes. Within 20-30cm, all units receive 3d strikes.
4) Units killed by the FIRST nuclear strike in a game count DOUBLE towards breakpoint, due to the shock of the initial attack.

Thoughts? I already think that the latter rule might be a bridge too far, but I'd like to hear what people think of it as a framework.

A few of thoughts if they're of any use:

1. After the nukes gone off anything flammable in the blast area such as woods, grassland, wooden buildings etc will a) be flattened and b) burn for quite some time, so that would slow or prevent movement through the area.

2. The central 5cm radius of the crater's should be impassible and any troops falling back though it should be destroyed or take a bucket load of hits (depending on the type of unit). Units entering the next range band out from the crater should take hits if not protected.

3. Any morale/breakpoint effect should apply to both sides as whichever side you're on I'm sure you'll get a bit worried once the nukes start flying.

4. You might want to allow ground/underground bursts as well as air bursts to allow fortifications to be targeted/damaged. Also troops in fortifications should be better protected from the effects you describe, except of course if they end up under the centre of the blast.

5. Fonally if you're playing a campaign it might be worth thinking about the effects using nukes will have, e.g. Political fall out, widening of the war, mercenaries not being paid because they nuked the farm land they were employed to recapture etc etc.

Thanks for the comments - all excellent points! Your 1 and 2 I'm going to add in more or less verbatim. Your 3 is what I had intended - perhaps a slightly less heavy impact on the firing side, but even your own troops are going to get itchy when nukes start to fly. I also like the idea of different "flavors" of nuke or ground/air/bunker-buster types, though I'll gave to ponder how to make them stick exactly.

Your last point is the one that REALLY is a good idea, and fits my plans ideally - that tacnukes become most dangerous in a campaign context. I've been considering a campaign statistic called "heat," which represents the intensity of a conflict based on what you do in battles. If your unit takes too much heat, then superpowers (namely ENSPUN and the Russian Confederation) start to intervene, and the First Upheaval starts to get more dangerous. So you might fire off a few nukes to win a critical battle only to find that the English-Speaking Union has thrown its weight behind your opponent in the next battle, giving them extra units or assets to use against you. Or, conversely, an act of restraint or the meeting of a particularly selfless objective might make you heroes in the media, giving you access to supplies or new recruits, or some special tech upgrades. That will need some balancing naturally, but I think it's the best way to keep nukes from getting silly.

Also, I think scenarios will have an NBC environment similar to the Air Superiority environment, determining how likely a nuclear strike us, and adding a penalty or bonus to calling one in.

They should also be very expensive points wise. Perhaps 500-600 points. It should cause you to stop and think about using them. They may be useful for digging out dug in units, or if you are about to be overrun. But they shouldn't be so cheap points wise that you just pop them off like candy.

Glad you liked my suggestions Mr Average.

In the context of a campaign you might want to have some sort of chart to roll on to see if NBC weapons are available to a particular force and what the trigger points are that allow their use or allow the CO to request their use. A lot will depend on the background you're developing (things like whether there are treaties limiting their use/manufacture, past use in earlier wars etc).

Even if they are used its worth thinking about whether word of their use can spread or not. If comms are jammed and your fleets own space in low orbit the chances of word getting out about what you've been up to will be quite low which reduces the chances of any intervention. Also the political ramifications of using a nuke on a distant colony are going to be very different to using them on someones home world.

I suppse another thing to think about is can the enemies air defences intercept an incoming nuke? It will depend on how its delivered but it gives the enemy a chance to defend against a strike so you can't just vaporise their entire force too easily. If for example you shoot down an aircraft carrying a nuke is there then a chance that your radiological detectors will pick up on the remains of the nuke so you then know what your enemy was planning and there would be political fall out from that too.

In CWC game terms they'd be delivered via an asset on a planned turn and point. As such you'd just have to pay the points for them in army selection.

I'd make them 0-1 for all armies that might have them, and restrict ot historical ones only. US, UK, France, Soviet Union in Western Europe/high intensity warfare, possibly NATO Minor, FRG, Warpac if you consider the weapons held by their respective alliance "partners" would be released in their support (not unlikely, and many had dual keys/access anyway).

Cost is awkward - I guess you;'d have to decide on amount of dice then cost similar to arty with chemical/thrmobaric assets? Then knock 25% off for one use (I think, from FWC points calc!).

CWC deliberately leaves them out, I think, lest FROGs and Honest Johns make the battlefield too hot to handle; and not without good reason. Probably the weapons I'm imagining are more like modernized Davy Crockett weapons... Maybe a bit bigger, in the 1-2kT range.

A good point above about delivery systems, too, though. Artillery could only really throw a small one - you want a big blast, you'd need a cruise missile, battlefield ballistic, or a fighter-bomber with deadfall ordinance.

A thought: low tech is limited to airborne DFOs; Standard to air and missile; High to air, missile, and possibly low orbit. But then, that wasn't even true in the Cold War, since we had air and missile artillery nukes since the 1950s. So maybe to make nukes susceptible to detection is the better idea.

What about kinetic strikes? This would be different from an orbital bombardment in that a big rock produces a nuke like blast, without all the pesky radiation.

Satellite Rain? That would be within the tech level of the campaign milieu, for sure.

About that, by the way, if it helps get an idea of the scope - the war that the campaign follows takes place within the Solar System, and primarily on Earth (Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Central America). The non-Earth locales are the Moon, Mars, Io, Ganymede, Titan and Nereid.

Using nukes on Earth would be universally considered an atrocity early in the First Upheaval, but slightly less so later on. Nukes on the inner colonies would be discoverable, but maybe not immediately known to all parties. On the outer colonies (Titan and Nereid) they would be easier to conceal.

Derp, yes, you're actually talking about using them in FWC; I think I've crossed threads after some discussion about them in CWC

For FWC I'd probably limit them to 0-1 anyway, give them 16 dice (double a heavy Orbital Strike, give them real grunt!), remove anything within 5cm of the blast centre, 16 dice on 4+ and auto suppress out to 25cm, 8 dice normal suppression out to 50cm's.

Give them a hits & save value to represent the delivery method, counter measures etc - low tech quite low, normal decent, high tech, err, higher. Then allow HQs & COs to "shoot them down", representing the nuclear dampers, ECM generators, off table ABMS, orbital interdiction, AAA etc that might interfere with their deployment.

I'd probably also say they have to be preplanned...

Slightly OT to Mr Average: What campaign are you discussing? One that you made up? or is it an available resource?

In the FWC milieu that I envision (because I am playing not-Eldar xenos) I suspect various non-human races may have wildly differing moral environments and any reluctance to use nukes in a battlefield situation would be based more on radiological effects on resource or infrastructure objectives.

It's a just-beyond-near-future campaign I'm writing that takes place in the Solar System, as a FWC campaign and possibly a basis for a comic series. The war is called the First Upheaval and as I develop it I'll make it available somehow, if it interests people.

No aliens, the belligerents are all humans. Though different nations have different tolerances for dirty warfare, or even warfare in general.

Is Mars and the various moons you mentioned terraformed? Just thinking about the effect nukes would have in a vacuum (no oxygen for fires for example) or a thick atmosphere like Titan or Venus.

That sounds very cool. 'jsmcgary' and I are going to play some scenarios out of the rulebook to familiarize ourselves with the system (I am new to the xWC rule set) and give us time to complete our collections.

I, for one, would be interested in seeing parts of it "published", and would be willing to help flesh things out if you want.

Mars is not terraformed, but there are plans to do so. Hellas Planitia is a state in the ASA, which us a successor to the United States and a member of ENSPUN, the English-Speaking Union (which I aped shamelessly from Anthony Burgess because I liked the sound of it.) The Russian Confederation has colonies near the Martian North Pole, and the United States of Western Europe have one dug into the face ofthe Valles Marineris. Venus is an empty rock. The Lunar colonies are mostly European and Chinese. The outer colonies, beyond Jupiter, are run as investments by private groups, or as semi-recognized independents. The colonies around Jupiter are largely funded by South and Central American and African banking interests.

Public domain info says Tac Nucs have a power range of at least three orders of magnitude, so you have to decide what is being used. AIM-26 Falcon warheads were about 0.25 ktTNT equivalent. W88 (Trident?) warheads around 500ktTNT. Lets assume you allow only 1kT warheads, with optimum burst altitude on a clear day. Public domain damage data suggests damage radii are : Complete destruction of buildings 200metres, buildings ruined but standing 600m, moderate building damage 1700 m. Vehicles : railway cars thrown off tracks & crushed 400 metres. Civilians : third degree burns 600metres, second degree burns 800 m. Lethal radiation (10 grays) 800 metres. FWC armoured targets and Cyborgs might be resilient, but I have ignored EMP effects.

If you use a ground scale of 10 cm = 200 metres, you could use ToxicPixies suggestion above --> limit to 0-1 anyway, give them 16 dice (double a heavy Orbital Strike, give them real grunt!), remove anything within 5cm of the blast centre, 16 dice on 4+ and auto suppress out to 25cm, 8 dice normal suppression out to 50cm's.

Remember to wear shades

Personally I would just render all nukes ineffective via Anomalous Physics Battlefield Jamming technology. After all, we got that in the 1950s from the Roswell crash site.....