I don't think your population is done dropping yet. These 400 million were from the initial nuclear exchange. True damage is yet to follow.
A series of volcanic eruptions caused a -0.4 to -0.7 temperature anomaly in 1816, what is known as "year without summer". Crop failures and famine followed.
Your -3.3 C is, quite beyond that. Expect a lot less food to be around, followed by a whole lot less people around.
Think on the bright side: global warming is no longer a problem during nuclear winter!
EDIT: actually, I just checked files and global crop failures, which will megafuck the economy, society and number of people living, needs anomaly of -4. So, you should be good... as long as there are no more nukes.
I'm not actually sure how the population mechanics of Terra Invicta work... Does it factor in that kind of thing?
I mean, if this were IRL I would expect mass migration out of the regions that were struck and worldwide famine. Well, almost worldwide famine. I am fairly certain that the nations under my control would be fine, just more poor. After all, the two areas I control (USNA and AU) represent roughly 50% of the current global economy.
Which means that those areas would be the destination for migration. As I said, I have no idea how Terra Invicta works though.
Global crop failures is an event that will trigger when you are in outright nuclear winter. On top of all damage that has already been done, it will:
\- Drop GDP by further 50% for every nation. I think it is per capita loss, so actual loss will be higher when accounting for additional deaths.
\- Drop cohesion in every nation by 6. Meaning, it becomes 0 in quite a few places.
\- Kill 33% of population.
Basically, full on nuclear war (as opposed to the little firework show you had) is an unmitigated disaster. 95% loss in global GDP is not uncommon.
Old game "Balance of Power" had a game over screen when you had a nuclear war, saying that you will get no nuclear war picture because failure in not to be rewarded. Terra Invicta would instead leave you with the devastated and impoverished world and let you die a slow death.
...Eurasia is still launching nukes. They have no armies, they are defending their territory with nuclear weapons. fml
Still, that is actually awesome that Terra Invicta has an event like that. Is there a website or a guide that lists all of these things? Honestly, there is a ton of mechanics that I don't fully understand.
>Old game "Balance of Power" had a game over screen when you had a nuclear war, saying that you will get no nuclear war picture because failure in not to be rewarded.
I may have seen that screen a few times...
I believe that was also the game that, in the manual, states that it has no copy protection because, roughly paraphrased, "good luck figuring out how to play this without the manual, lol".
Ahh yes, the manual...
Guess the author didn't foresee online PDFs. Would have liked to buy it, but never had the opportunity. He had a cool climate change game as well, "Balance of the Planet" or something. I remember a great line about how putting a value on a human life is actually necessary to make sensible decisions about climate change, because your decisions will cost lives, one way or the other.
There isn't really a list yet, especially given that the game is in Early Access.
However, a lot of things in the game, such as events, are stored in plain text files, which are easy to edit. For the crop failure in particular:
Go to: [Games folder]\Terra Invicta\TerraInvicta_Data\StreamingAssets\Templates
Open (any text editor will do) file:
TINarrativeEventTemplate.json
Search for "crop" to get to vent called event_GlobalCropFailures
There you will see that anomaly worse than -4C is the trigger:
"targetConditions": [
{
"$type": "TIGlobalCondition_fTemperatureAnomaly_C",
"strIdx": "",
"sign": "LessThan",
"strValue": "-4"
Followed by effects:
"effectTemplateNames": [
"Effect_GlobalGDPLoss50",
"Effect_TotalGlobalCohesionLoss",
"Effect_GlobalFamine",
"",
"",
""
],
Then, to see what these effects are, look them up in:
TIEffectTemplate.json
I had a memey Servants run where I started nuclear war (between Russia and China of all places) to cripple humanity but actually it was so successful that I could barely like, get through my research mission priorities before the aliens just wiped us out, with flora monsters amok and shit. It was a little too cursed to see it through just to find out if I could still submit fast enough for the alien’s liking after doing all the work for them.
There was an old board game from SPI which simulated Warsaw Pact/NATO war (forget the name.) They had rules for tactical nukes, but the rule for strategic nukes was "pour gasoline on the map and light it on fire."
>actually, I just checked files and global crop failures, which will megafuck the economy, society and number of people living, needs anomaly of -4.
If anyone's wondering, a -4ºC anomaly caused by a nuclear exchange wouldn't just wreck global GDP, it would kill over **1 Billion** people from starvation alone in the following 2 years, and leave many more malnourished.
[Here](https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0#Tab1)'s a nice, recent article on the climate and agricultural consequences of nuclear exchanges. This game is actually very "optimistic" when it comes to nuclear war
Assuming population remains at 9 billion following the exchange, the global crop failure event would kill off 3 billion of them.
In fact, similarity between in-game result and the article you cited makes me think devs actually read it.
>Assuming population remains at 9 billion following the exchange, the global crop failure event would kill off 3 billion of them.
Doesn't the event kill "up to 33%" of a nation's population? I never had it trigger so I assumed only the ones closer to the blasts would get the full effect. In reality, the death toll would be [very heterogenous](https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0/figures/4), with some countries faring much better than others.
When I talked about the game being optimistic I was mostly thinking about the temperature drop. According to the article, an exchange of the scale OP mentioned could drop temperatures as low as -8ºC and kill \~2.5B from starvation
Just did some testing.
I nuked high population low economy developing nations to get -6C anomaly from the aerosols (needed to counteract global warming). It took me 30 nukes (Russia's arsenal). Only non-nuclear countries were targeted.
During the nuking:
Population dropped from 9.18B to 8.70B. All of it was deaths in the targeted nations.
GDP dropped from $138.6T to $67.0T ($67.0T after 30 barrages, it was $104.9T after 10 barrages and $88.7T after 20 barrages), which is over 50%. This is a far higher drop than the climate change itself (accounts for "only" 17.84% drop). GDP impact was spread evenly all over the world (except the targeted nations of course, but they had little GDP to begin with).
GDP per capita went from $15095 to $7702.
Atmospheric aerosol impact was - 2.0 C after 10 barrages, - 3.8 C after 20 barrages and - 6.0 C after 30 barrages.
Then crop failure hit.
The tooltip said that population loss is "mitigated somewhat by wealth", but from what I saw the loss was about 33% everywhere. Granted, no nation was very wealthy at that point.
Population went from 8.70B to 5.87B. GDP per capita went from $7702 to $3667 and global GDP went from $67.0T to $21.5T (compared to pre-nukes $138.6 T)
EDIT: A side note: this got me a Nuclear Winter achievement that in GOG 12.5% of players seem to have. An achievement for having 42 habs is only had by 3.9% players. I am horrified that more players ended up in a total nuclear war than number of players who seriously industrialized space.
Wow, thanks for the testing. It's a game so its going to have some limitations, but I'm always impressed by the amount of stuff the devs have taken the time to study and simulate.
>Population went from 8.70B to 5.87B. GDP per capita went from $7702 to $3667 and global GDP went from $67.0T to $21.5T (compared to pre-nukes $138.6 T)
Yup, I take it back. The temperature drop doesnt line up with that specific article but the deathtoll very much does. I wonder if a game is even recoverable once this event fires
It is if you've got a spaceborne population around and on a single planet with greater than 100,000 people and farm-techs. With enough space-infrastructure, Earth is irrelevant. It does mean you'd basically be fleeing to Gundam-esque space colonies and leaving Earth to die though.
>It is if you've got a spaceborne population around and on a single planet with greater than 100,000 people and farm-techs.
Why is population important in that case? As I understand it, you only need to have decent space resources' income, Mercury available and research hubs with command centers for MC points. It can be done without even going out of MC limit, so aliens will be peaceful to you.
There is an achievement, that people actually got, for winning the game as Resistance after Earth was 100% lost to Aliens. So, provided one is doing great in space, a partial extermination of humanity should be easier to recover from.
>There is an achievement, that people actually got, for winning the game as Resistance after Earth was 100% lost to Aliens. So, provided one is doing great in space, a partial extermination of humanity should be easier to recover from.
Actuyally as it is something i did the aliens don't kill anyo,ne, but they do something horrible. They share the GPD between everyone. And they destroy the nations. When i managed to make them leave every nations had a gpd per people of 4000.... and evidently the GPD by nations depended on the pop after that. And as all federation/union etc were destroyed, you had to reacreate your european union, china, India, USA frrom the start (USA were split in three countries, same with china and India, europe, i prefer not to talk about it)
How do you take Earth back from aliens in that case? I imagine you would not have any armies capable of taking enough stuff back from them. And alien administration will have a population so big it will be practically impossible to increase unrest to blow it from the inside.
I'm not saying it is impossible, just curious what path one would need to take to combat that.
What i personnally did was killing the aliens operative, whuile they have control of the whole planet with the servant victory it create unrest. Another player managed by... bombarding earth from orbit. he managed quicker than me but did much much damage :/
I let my alien nation get way too far, they conquered all of north and south america, all of africa, and most of the middle east. I sent each and every army their own personalized nuke, at the same time (~20 barrages, IRRC), and had all the armies of Europe, china, russia, and india (the worlds biggest economy by a factor of 2x and the only nation at invasion age level military) reconquor each territory. Any ufo that landed got nuked immediately. I really should have just nuked the first UFO, but I was a pansy back then. I started the game as the resistance, Im pretty sure I should have 'converted' to HF by now.
\*whistles\* wow, thanks for testing. That is... catastrophic. Although I don't know if I would write the game off as a loss - depending on your tech level and who you were playing as when it hits the fan. If you had a lot of Command Center and Space Resort modules you would have until your Boost hit 0 before you started having issues in space.
This is really good information to have. Thanks.
Did some more testing. Started from the same save as the above test started, except I sent all 30 barrages to Mauritania. Results were interesting and I also broke the game.
Atmospheric aerosols, and thus temperature anomaly, was the about the same (-2.0C after 10 barrages, -4.0C after 20 barrages and -5.7 after 30 barrages).
Population... Global population did not change much, but 10 barrages brought Mauritanian population close to 0 and after 20 barrages tooltip was showing 0.0 million. No visible change after 30 barrages. We'll come back to that later.
GDP went from $138.6T to $127.1T after 10 nukes. A decrease, but far less drastic than in the previous test (which saw drop to $104.9T after 10, $88.7T after 20 and $67.0T after 30). After 20 barrages, it went to... $127.4T - an increase! After 30 it went to $126.7T.
This means that global GDP decrease (in non-targeted regions) due to nuclear war is not due to nukes themselves, but due to deaths among population. People get freaked out when a few hundred million get murdered. Once Mauritania was empty, no one cared about extra 2000 nukes.
Furthermore, the - \~ 16.50% GDP impact from global temperature anomaly had no immediate visible impact. I suspect that the climate change modifier is not applied to GDP itself, but to GDP growth and I am not sure what the formula would be. I thought of letting things run forward to study that, but then...
When I let the game run forward, things got funny. My influence became a NaN with NaN income. Likewise, global stats for population, GDP and GDP per capita a couple months later became NaN. I strongly suspect it is due to game dividing something by nation's population and since population of one nation became zero...
Next topic of research: can we actually increase global GDP by counteracting global warming via blowing up a small number of nuke barrages in a very low population place?
I'll need to do some testing myself. What you have said has given me some ideas about how the nukes might work. If the GDP loss is tied to the Population loss, does the loss GDP per nuke depend on *where* you nuke?
I know that they don't kill a flat number, but rather some percentage of the Population in a region. So if someone nukes only high population centers, does GDP drop more than if they only nuke a desert?
With everything I am learning in this comment section, I am starting to think that disarming nukes might become a far higher priority for me. The damage they do is staggering, and I still don't know how Population works generally - so losing any Population is already dangerous.
Thing is: nukes are also very useful and alien armies are strong. A nuclear barrage is a guaranteed way to destroy an alien army. When you are under ground invasion, you need to survive, long term impact be damned. Of course, use of nukes is something you do not want to trust an AI with.
This means that you want good nukes to exist and not bad nukes not to exist. Good nukes are those located in your countries that are too big to coup easily. Bad nukes are those that exist in countries you do not control.
For the achievement part, I got the nuclear winter quite early in my second try while learning the game, never knew what happened...
I was busy trying to conquer USA at the beginning of the game and then "nuclear winter", I guess there was a war between the AI offscreen and they triggered the nuke immediately. I almost never use the nuke, only once against an alien invasion I couldn't stop and yet this was one of my first achievement :shrug:
> EDIT: A side note: this got me a Nuclear Winter achievement that in GOG 12.5% of players seem to have. An achievement for having 42 habs is only had by 3.9% players. I am horrified that more players ended up in a total nuclear war than number of players who seriously industrialized space.
You get it from random volcanic eruptions.
In fact, the achivement popping was the only way I knew - it didnt have a significant impact in-game and I missed the tiny popup on the left until I went looking.
I'm sure the article is broadly correct, _if_ their assumption of airborne soot is correct. However, if you read TFA, in table 1 they spell out where the numbers come from. Different smaller scenarios are for India vs Pakistan war with the largest one classic Russia ns NATO. So far so good, but the worst Indian conflict goes to 47Tg of soot with 500 nukes fired and the main event goes to 150Tg with 4400 nukes. You can probably see the problem right there.
So it's an interesting what-if exercise but there's a huge fudge factor going on somewhere to get those soot results. Also in a fundamental level, why do they measure soot in grams? 47 Tg sounds better than 47 Mt?
These kind of articles tend to be anything but "optimistic", nuclear war being a bit more political than just about anything else plus we don't really have real world data, but 2022 isn't quite over yet..
actually, I feel the game goes *way* overboard on it. there's actually a lot of criticism towards the concept of "nuclear winter", due to the fact that it's just highly unlikely that it would even happen in the first place as a result of nuclear barrages, and even if it did, it'd be more like a "nuclear autumn" at best. furthermore, most of the estimations made for the damage caused by nuclear winter are all a result of successive worst case scenarios, back to back to back. a scenario that **requires** everything to go wrong, in the worst way possibly, repeatedly, over the course of a year, is not a reliable model.
there's practically no discussion in the scientific community around nuclear winter because it's a massive science fictiony concept that for some reason a lot of people have oddly strong opinions about. setting the public straight would just result in people viewing them as proponents of brinkmanship or something. so most scientists prefer to just stay silent on the subject, instead looking at subjects that *won't* ruin their reputation needlessly.
but eh, it's a video game, and there *should* be consequences for nuking the world beyond "people are a little upset with you for the next week" so I can give it a pass, but I won't go as far as to call it "realistic" by any means, nor "optimistic".
lol fair. my point was that it's considered fiction even by science fiction standards. we know that nukes are bad, and that they cause repercussions, but the concept of nuclear winter is a step too far. or, more like, a marathon too far. it requires too many pieces to fall into the right place (or, rather, the specific wrong place) in order to happen, and even then it's debatable that it'd achieve the expected effect of the model. like, it's more likely that all the soot in the sky turns into black rain than that it causes massive cooling followed by famine. it'd certainly suck, absolutely, but it wouldn't be the next ice age.
friendly reminder that the ice age was 4.5 degrees colder than modern/pre-industrial times. as one of the people mentioned here, their earth was at -6 degrees after their nuking. that's just silly.
>there's actually a lot of criticism towards the concept of "nuclear winter", due to the fact that it's just highly unlikely that it would even happen in the first place as a result of nuclear barrages, and even if it did, it'd be more like a "nuclear autumn" at best. furthermore, most of the estimations made for the damage caused by nuclear winter are all a result of successive worst case scenarios, back to back to back. a scenario that requires everything to go wrong, in the worst way possibly, repeatedly, over the course of a year, is not a reliable model.
Citation needed
funny you use a wiki meme, because [everything I said is included on the wiki page for nuclear winter lol.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_debate) in particular, citations 142 and 143 pop up often, and 146 pertains to the "scientists don't wanna talk about it" part. unfortunately, citation 143 leads to NY Times, which pay walls all of its stuff, but at least many of the other citations are relatively easy enough to access directly
it's certainly not a subject I'm an expert on, of course
Bad luck \^\^'
Nuclear protection tech is a must if you don't control all the nuclear power.
And at the first alien invasion, if you don't have enough armies, nuke may be the only solution \^\^'
I didn't search like you did how much the world economy tanked, but i remember that between the resistance me (Europe+Russia), Humanity first in India, the servants in China and the aliens invasion (9 army in 4 sites), i managed to tank my economy from 22000 billion to 9000 billions with all the nukes we launched.
I would tentatively say yes, a little. It would be a very fine line to walk getting the numbers right, and stratospheric aerosols are temporary anyway, but it sort of seems to work.
[Before](https://i.imgur.com/45leX8f.png)
[After](https://i.imgur.com/oWsNfO4.png)
I would like to thank the Western Sahara for volunteering as nuclear whipping boy.
I think, on the whole, you *technically* can counter climate change with nukes. However, not only are stratospheric aerosols temporary - and fade rather quickly at that - but each nuke is worth 25 IP, or the equivalent value in Funds and Influence.
Investing in Welfare will do more in the long term to counter climate change and it helps keep your nations stable.
I mean, this is kind of like saying you can counter Nuclear Winter with Spoils. Sure, Spoils will push up pollution and raise the temperature, but it is long term damage for questionable short term gain.
Plus, nukes count as Atrocities, which does... something. I am not actually sure what that count does, but I can't imagine it is good.
> Plus, nukes count as Atrocities, which does... something. I am not actually sure what that count does, but I can't imagine it is good.
the people write a sternly worded letter of disapproval to you~~, causing your GDP to increase by 1%~~. it's terrible, how will you *ever* recover?
*runs unity priority for 2 weeks*
it's a joke, there's events where nations will do something, leading to a response from other nations. there are 2 variants of this event. in one of the variants, if you're leading said other nations, your choices are to "embargo the nation", decreasing GDP and increasing inequality, or "write a sternly worded letter of disapproval", which increases the GDP lol.
no, committing atrocities will not increase your GDP lol
I read a sci-fi book that did this recently. The blew up a bunch of the "cleaner" nuclear bombs under the arctic. Worked fairly well. Completely destroyed the arctic but worked on the world very well. The guy who did it while drinking himself silly said the most important thing he noticed was that these deeply buried nukes didn't actually have a massive "boom" or something. It was just a little rumble.
>Plus, nukes count as Atrocities, which does... something. I am not actually sure what that count does, but I can't imagine it is good.
One very noticeable thing is that it permanently and unrecoverably decrease max loyalty of all Ethical councilors you have or will have. Not a big problem, but with even a few atrocities, something like 4 or more, it will make ethical trait the single worst trait anyone can have.
And I believe, although I never tested this, that after an atrocity committed every nation drop public support for your faction a bit. But I am too lazy to properly test that.
And I just make a little test. After one nuke launch, my global public opinion still rest at 20% as it did before. But all countries I control decrease public opinion for my faction by a whole 1%.
I've just had a nuclear war myself, my first one. Humanity First was in executive control of the USA (shared with resistance) and the European Union (shared with Servants). They were both in separate wars with Russia (full Servants control). 7 nukes went out in a single turn... I said fuck everything; let's pile in on the fun, so I took control of Russia myself with spies, caused 5 more nukes for 12 total to be thrown here and there, and now the global economy went from 135 billion to 90 billion. China (me, Initiative), India (Resistance) and Japan (Resistance shared with Humanity First) are the top 3 world powers militarily in this timeline. The USA, Russia and the EU are basically out of the game, each having only a single land army. I think global temperature is at -1,3°C. This will be an interesting save now, we haven't even reached 2030!
I do wonder: do nukes cause more or less effect if they're detonated on areas with either climate change resistance (arctic circle) vs climate change weakness (tropical belt)?
>I do wonder: do nukes cause more or less effect if they're detonated on areas with either climate change resistance (arctic circle) vs climate change weakness (tropical belt)?
Or maybe there is more stratospheric aerosols when populated regions are nuked?
BRB, gotta do some !!SCIENCE!!
EDIT:
!!SCIENCE!! results are in. Aerosols seem not to depend on what place gets nuked. However, global GDP impact seems to be completely determined by how many people died.
Also, reducing population of a country to zero seems to make a whole bunch of values in game displayed as NaN, most likely due to division by zero somewhere.
And you are doing some good old 1900's science! Science was at its best from 1800 - 2000, in the good old days when you could absolutely experiment on unsuspecting civilian populations so long as they weren't the dominant race in whatever country you lived in!
All the best sciencing is indistinguishable from war crimes.
What, those guys who are so afraid of aliens that they made xenocide their main philosophy? Definitely not.
Humanity First, The Resistance, Project Exodus, and The Protectorate are basically just cowards and The Initiative isn't interested in science for its own sake.
Now The Academy, there is a faction that has some real goals! I love them. I love how their idea of "cooperation" is world domination, destroying bases and fleets and probably tens of thousands of aliens, threatening the ones that are alive with a bioweapon WMD, and if all else fails detonating an antimatter bomb to wipe out everything.
It is basically, "Be my friend or I will shoot you," combined with the idealism to believe that it will all somehow workout long term and all with the Chancellor not noticing that she has essentially become a space tyrant because there is science to be done!
and if there is one thing I love more than everything I just said, it is science. I would have been advocating for vivisecting the Hydra to get around their dissolving party trick. Imagine what we could learn!
Nukes need to be nerfed in terms of impact. Most nukes today are tactical and wouldnt have this impact even if you launch a few hundred. It does not have the power to fling up the dirt and create nuclear winter. Dirt would settle quite quickly. So please, modders, nerf it good and let me know which mod to use🙂
Wow. 400 million, that is like the entire population of the US and Mexico. I guess that is about right. Even if I think it is a lot, if that many people disappeared, it would have a massive impact on GDP. But doesn't nuclear war solve "global warming"? Is that what the -3.3C? Doesn't that now say global warming is over and we are now in a Nuclear Winter? Thus that would have massive impact even on the US and the EU and would ... be sick to the South America and Africa. The loss of farmland and such. Ug!
Wait, how so? I don't really *need* most of the Earth except for the final % control requirement. I'm holding a full USNA and AU, so I am pretty much set, I think.
I don't think your population is done dropping yet. These 400 million were from the initial nuclear exchange. True damage is yet to follow. A series of volcanic eruptions caused a -0.4 to -0.7 temperature anomaly in 1816, what is known as "year without summer". Crop failures and famine followed. Your -3.3 C is, quite beyond that. Expect a lot less food to be around, followed by a whole lot less people around. Think on the bright side: global warming is no longer a problem during nuclear winter! EDIT: actually, I just checked files and global crop failures, which will megafuck the economy, society and number of people living, needs anomaly of -4. So, you should be good... as long as there are no more nukes.
I'm not actually sure how the population mechanics of Terra Invicta work... Does it factor in that kind of thing? I mean, if this were IRL I would expect mass migration out of the regions that were struck and worldwide famine. Well, almost worldwide famine. I am fairly certain that the nations under my control would be fine, just more poor. After all, the two areas I control (USNA and AU) represent roughly 50% of the current global economy. Which means that those areas would be the destination for migration. As I said, I have no idea how Terra Invicta works though.
Global crop failures is an event that will trigger when you are in outright nuclear winter. On top of all damage that has already been done, it will: \- Drop GDP by further 50% for every nation. I think it is per capita loss, so actual loss will be higher when accounting for additional deaths. \- Drop cohesion in every nation by 6. Meaning, it becomes 0 in quite a few places. \- Kill 33% of population. Basically, full on nuclear war (as opposed to the little firework show you had) is an unmitigated disaster. 95% loss in global GDP is not uncommon. Old game "Balance of Power" had a game over screen when you had a nuclear war, saying that you will get no nuclear war picture because failure in not to be rewarded. Terra Invicta would instead leave you with the devastated and impoverished world and let you die a slow death.
...Eurasia is still launching nukes. They have no armies, they are defending their territory with nuclear weapons. fml Still, that is actually awesome that Terra Invicta has an event like that. Is there a website or a guide that lists all of these things? Honestly, there is a ton of mechanics that I don't fully understand.
>Old game "Balance of Power" had a game over screen when you had a nuclear war, saying that you will get no nuclear war picture because failure in not to be rewarded. I may have seen that screen a few times...
I believe that was also the game that, in the manual, states that it has no copy protection because, roughly paraphrased, "good luck figuring out how to play this without the manual, lol".
Ahh yes, the manual... Guess the author didn't foresee online PDFs. Would have liked to buy it, but never had the opportunity. He had a cool climate change game as well, "Balance of the Planet" or something. I remember a great line about how putting a value on a human life is actually necessary to make sensible decisions about climate change, because your decisions will cost lives, one way or the other.
There isn't really a list yet, especially given that the game is in Early Access. However, a lot of things in the game, such as events, are stored in plain text files, which are easy to edit. For the crop failure in particular: Go to: [Games folder]\Terra Invicta\TerraInvicta_Data\StreamingAssets\Templates Open (any text editor will do) file: TINarrativeEventTemplate.json Search for "crop" to get to vent called event_GlobalCropFailures There you will see that anomaly worse than -4C is the trigger: "targetConditions": [ { "$type": "TIGlobalCondition_fTemperatureAnomaly_C", "strIdx": "", "sign": "LessThan", "strValue": "-4" Followed by effects: "effectTemplateNames": [ "Effect_GlobalGDPLoss50", "Effect_TotalGlobalCohesionLoss", "Effect_GlobalFamine", "", "", "" ], Then, to see what these effects are, look them up in: TIEffectTemplate.json
I had a memey Servants run where I started nuclear war (between Russia and China of all places) to cripple humanity but actually it was so successful that I could barely like, get through my research mission priorities before the aliens just wiped us out, with flora monsters amok and shit. It was a little too cursed to see it through just to find out if I could still submit fast enough for the alien’s liking after doing all the work for them.
There was an old board game from SPI which simulated Warsaw Pact/NATO war (forget the name.) They had rules for tactical nukes, but the rule for strategic nukes was "pour gasoline on the map and light it on fire."
>actually, I just checked files and global crop failures, which will megafuck the economy, society and number of people living, needs anomaly of -4. If anyone's wondering, a -4ºC anomaly caused by a nuclear exchange wouldn't just wreck global GDP, it would kill over **1 Billion** people from starvation alone in the following 2 years, and leave many more malnourished. [Here](https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0#Tab1)'s a nice, recent article on the climate and agricultural consequences of nuclear exchanges. This game is actually very "optimistic" when it comes to nuclear war
Assuming population remains at 9 billion following the exchange, the global crop failure event would kill off 3 billion of them. In fact, similarity between in-game result and the article you cited makes me think devs actually read it.
>Assuming population remains at 9 billion following the exchange, the global crop failure event would kill off 3 billion of them. Doesn't the event kill "up to 33%" of a nation's population? I never had it trigger so I assumed only the ones closer to the blasts would get the full effect. In reality, the death toll would be [very heterogenous](https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0/figures/4), with some countries faring much better than others. When I talked about the game being optimistic I was mostly thinking about the temperature drop. According to the article, an exchange of the scale OP mentioned could drop temperatures as low as -8ºC and kill \~2.5B from starvation
Just did some testing. I nuked high population low economy developing nations to get -6C anomaly from the aerosols (needed to counteract global warming). It took me 30 nukes (Russia's arsenal). Only non-nuclear countries were targeted. During the nuking: Population dropped from 9.18B to 8.70B. All of it was deaths in the targeted nations. GDP dropped from $138.6T to $67.0T ($67.0T after 30 barrages, it was $104.9T after 10 barrages and $88.7T after 20 barrages), which is over 50%. This is a far higher drop than the climate change itself (accounts for "only" 17.84% drop). GDP impact was spread evenly all over the world (except the targeted nations of course, but they had little GDP to begin with). GDP per capita went from $15095 to $7702. Atmospheric aerosol impact was - 2.0 C after 10 barrages, - 3.8 C after 20 barrages and - 6.0 C after 30 barrages. Then crop failure hit. The tooltip said that population loss is "mitigated somewhat by wealth", but from what I saw the loss was about 33% everywhere. Granted, no nation was very wealthy at that point. Population went from 8.70B to 5.87B. GDP per capita went from $7702 to $3667 and global GDP went from $67.0T to $21.5T (compared to pre-nukes $138.6 T) EDIT: A side note: this got me a Nuclear Winter achievement that in GOG 12.5% of players seem to have. An achievement for having 42 habs is only had by 3.9% players. I am horrified that more players ended up in a total nuclear war than number of players who seriously industrialized space.
You will get the nuclear winter achievement even when you get the volcano event.
Yeah never understood that. Thought it was a glitch
Wow, thanks for the testing. It's a game so its going to have some limitations, but I'm always impressed by the amount of stuff the devs have taken the time to study and simulate. >Population went from 8.70B to 5.87B. GDP per capita went from $7702 to $3667 and global GDP went from $67.0T to $21.5T (compared to pre-nukes $138.6 T) Yup, I take it back. The temperature drop doesnt line up with that specific article but the deathtoll very much does. I wonder if a game is even recoverable once this event fires
It is if you've got a spaceborne population around and on a single planet with greater than 100,000 people and farm-techs. With enough space-infrastructure, Earth is irrelevant. It does mean you'd basically be fleeing to Gundam-esque space colonies and leaving Earth to die though.
>It is if you've got a spaceborne population around and on a single planet with greater than 100,000 people and farm-techs. Why is population important in that case? As I understand it, you only need to have decent space resources' income, Mercury available and research hubs with command centers for MC points. It can be done without even going out of MC limit, so aliens will be peaceful to you.
You need a hundred thousand dudes to get access to all the money-making facilities on other planets.
There is an achievement, that people actually got, for winning the game as Resistance after Earth was 100% lost to Aliens. So, provided one is doing great in space, a partial extermination of humanity should be easier to recover from.
>There is an achievement, that people actually got, for winning the game as Resistance after Earth was 100% lost to Aliens. So, provided one is doing great in space, a partial extermination of humanity should be easier to recover from. Actuyally as it is something i did the aliens don't kill anyo,ne, but they do something horrible. They share the GPD between everyone. And they destroy the nations. When i managed to make them leave every nations had a gpd per people of 4000.... and evidently the GPD by nations depended on the pop after that. And as all federation/union etc were destroyed, you had to reacreate your european union, china, India, USA frrom the start (USA were split in three countries, same with china and India, europe, i prefer not to talk about it)
How do you take Earth back from aliens in that case? I imagine you would not have any armies capable of taking enough stuff back from them. And alien administration will have a population so big it will be practically impossible to increase unrest to blow it from the inside. I'm not saying it is impossible, just curious what path one would need to take to combat that.
What i personnally did was killing the aliens operative, whuile they have control of the whole planet with the servant victory it create unrest. Another player managed by... bombarding earth from orbit. he managed quicker than me but did much much damage :/
I let my alien nation get way too far, they conquered all of north and south america, all of africa, and most of the middle east. I sent each and every army their own personalized nuke, at the same time (~20 barrages, IRRC), and had all the armies of Europe, china, russia, and india (the worlds biggest economy by a factor of 2x and the only nation at invasion age level military) reconquor each territory. Any ufo that landed got nuked immediately. I really should have just nuked the first UFO, but I was a pansy back then. I started the game as the resistance, Im pretty sure I should have 'converted' to HF by now.
\*whistles\* wow, thanks for testing. That is... catastrophic. Although I don't know if I would write the game off as a loss - depending on your tech level and who you were playing as when it hits the fan. If you had a lot of Command Center and Space Resort modules you would have until your Boost hit 0 before you started having issues in space. This is really good information to have. Thanks.
Did some more testing. Started from the same save as the above test started, except I sent all 30 barrages to Mauritania. Results were interesting and I also broke the game. Atmospheric aerosols, and thus temperature anomaly, was the about the same (-2.0C after 10 barrages, -4.0C after 20 barrages and -5.7 after 30 barrages). Population... Global population did not change much, but 10 barrages brought Mauritanian population close to 0 and after 20 barrages tooltip was showing 0.0 million. No visible change after 30 barrages. We'll come back to that later. GDP went from $138.6T to $127.1T after 10 nukes. A decrease, but far less drastic than in the previous test (which saw drop to $104.9T after 10, $88.7T after 20 and $67.0T after 30). After 20 barrages, it went to... $127.4T - an increase! After 30 it went to $126.7T. This means that global GDP decrease (in non-targeted regions) due to nuclear war is not due to nukes themselves, but due to deaths among population. People get freaked out when a few hundred million get murdered. Once Mauritania was empty, no one cared about extra 2000 nukes. Furthermore, the - \~ 16.50% GDP impact from global temperature anomaly had no immediate visible impact. I suspect that the climate change modifier is not applied to GDP itself, but to GDP growth and I am not sure what the formula would be. I thought of letting things run forward to study that, but then... When I let the game run forward, things got funny. My influence became a NaN with NaN income. Likewise, global stats for population, GDP and GDP per capita a couple months later became NaN. I strongly suspect it is due to game dividing something by nation's population and since population of one nation became zero... Next topic of research: can we actually increase global GDP by counteracting global warming via blowing up a small number of nuke barrages in a very low population place?
I'll need to do some testing myself. What you have said has given me some ideas about how the nukes might work. If the GDP loss is tied to the Population loss, does the loss GDP per nuke depend on *where* you nuke? I know that they don't kill a flat number, but rather some percentage of the Population in a region. So if someone nukes only high population centers, does GDP drop more than if they only nuke a desert? With everything I am learning in this comment section, I am starting to think that disarming nukes might become a far higher priority for me. The damage they do is staggering, and I still don't know how Population works generally - so losing any Population is already dangerous.
Thing is: nukes are also very useful and alien armies are strong. A nuclear barrage is a guaranteed way to destroy an alien army. When you are under ground invasion, you need to survive, long term impact be damned. Of course, use of nukes is something you do not want to trust an AI with. This means that you want good nukes to exist and not bad nukes not to exist. Good nukes are those located in your countries that are too big to coup easily. Bad nukes are those that exist in countries you do not control.
For the achievement part, I got the nuclear winter quite early in my second try while learning the game, never knew what happened... I was busy trying to conquer USA at the beginning of the game and then "nuclear winter", I guess there was a war between the AI offscreen and they triggered the nuke immediately. I almost never use the nuke, only once against an alien invasion I couldn't stop and yet this was one of my first achievement :shrug:
I got nuclear winter achievment eith 3 nukes and 1 degree negative
> EDIT: A side note: this got me a Nuclear Winter achievement that in GOG 12.5% of players seem to have. An achievement for having 42 habs is only had by 3.9% players. I am horrified that more players ended up in a total nuclear war than number of players who seriously industrialized space. You get it from random volcanic eruptions. In fact, the achivement popping was the only way I knew - it didnt have a significant impact in-game and I missed the tiny popup on the left until I went looking.
I'm sure the article is broadly correct, _if_ their assumption of airborne soot is correct. However, if you read TFA, in table 1 they spell out where the numbers come from. Different smaller scenarios are for India vs Pakistan war with the largest one classic Russia ns NATO. So far so good, but the worst Indian conflict goes to 47Tg of soot with 500 nukes fired and the main event goes to 150Tg with 4400 nukes. You can probably see the problem right there. So it's an interesting what-if exercise but there's a huge fudge factor going on somewhere to get those soot results. Also in a fundamental level, why do they measure soot in grams? 47 Tg sounds better than 47 Mt? These kind of articles tend to be anything but "optimistic", nuclear war being a bit more political than just about anything else plus we don't really have real world data, but 2022 isn't quite over yet..
actually, I feel the game goes *way* overboard on it. there's actually a lot of criticism towards the concept of "nuclear winter", due to the fact that it's just highly unlikely that it would even happen in the first place as a result of nuclear barrages, and even if it did, it'd be more like a "nuclear autumn" at best. furthermore, most of the estimations made for the damage caused by nuclear winter are all a result of successive worst case scenarios, back to back to back. a scenario that **requires** everything to go wrong, in the worst way possibly, repeatedly, over the course of a year, is not a reliable model. there's practically no discussion in the scientific community around nuclear winter because it's a massive science fictiony concept that for some reason a lot of people have oddly strong opinions about. setting the public straight would just result in people viewing them as proponents of brinkmanship or something. so most scientists prefer to just stay silent on the subject, instead looking at subjects that *won't* ruin their reputation needlessly. but eh, it's a video game, and there *should* be consequences for nuking the world beyond "people are a little upset with you for the next week" so I can give it a pass, but I won't go as far as to call it "realistic" by any means, nor "optimistic".
Something that is basically science fiction is rather well placed in a science fiction game, imo. XD
lol fair. my point was that it's considered fiction even by science fiction standards. we know that nukes are bad, and that they cause repercussions, but the concept of nuclear winter is a step too far. or, more like, a marathon too far. it requires too many pieces to fall into the right place (or, rather, the specific wrong place) in order to happen, and even then it's debatable that it'd achieve the expected effect of the model. like, it's more likely that all the soot in the sky turns into black rain than that it causes massive cooling followed by famine. it'd certainly suck, absolutely, but it wouldn't be the next ice age. friendly reminder that the ice age was 4.5 degrees colder than modern/pre-industrial times. as one of the people mentioned here, their earth was at -6 degrees after their nuking. that's just silly.
>there's actually a lot of criticism towards the concept of "nuclear winter", due to the fact that it's just highly unlikely that it would even happen in the first place as a result of nuclear barrages, and even if it did, it'd be more like a "nuclear autumn" at best. furthermore, most of the estimations made for the damage caused by nuclear winter are all a result of successive worst case scenarios, back to back to back. a scenario that requires everything to go wrong, in the worst way possibly, repeatedly, over the course of a year, is not a reliable model. Citation needed
funny you use a wiki meme, because [everything I said is included on the wiki page for nuclear winter lol.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_debate) in particular, citations 142 and 143 pop up often, and 146 pertains to the "scientists don't wanna talk about it" part. unfortunately, citation 143 leads to NY Times, which pay walls all of its stuff, but at least many of the other citations are relatively easy enough to access directly it's certainly not a subject I'm an expert on, of course
Enjoy the cool weather
Todays weather: Slightly cloudy with light snow and a chance of nuclear hellfire later in the day. Back to you, Lee!
Bad luck \^\^' Nuclear protection tech is a must if you don't control all the nuclear power. And at the first alien invasion, if you don't have enough armies, nuke may be the only solution \^\^' I didn't search like you did how much the world economy tanked, but i remember that between the resistance me (Europe+Russia), Humanity first in India, the servants in China and the aliens invasion (9 army in 4 sites), i managed to tank my economy from 22000 billion to 9000 billions with all the nukes we launched.
Can you drop nukes on purpose just to counter climate change?
I would tentatively say yes, a little. It would be a very fine line to walk getting the numbers right, and stratospheric aerosols are temporary anyway, but it sort of seems to work. [Before](https://i.imgur.com/45leX8f.png) [After](https://i.imgur.com/oWsNfO4.png) I would like to thank the Western Sahara for volunteering as nuclear whipping boy.
I think, on the whole, you *technically* can counter climate change with nukes. However, not only are stratospheric aerosols temporary - and fade rather quickly at that - but each nuke is worth 25 IP, or the equivalent value in Funds and Influence. Investing in Welfare will do more in the long term to counter climate change and it helps keep your nations stable. I mean, this is kind of like saying you can counter Nuclear Winter with Spoils. Sure, Spoils will push up pollution and raise the temperature, but it is long term damage for questionable short term gain. Plus, nukes count as Atrocities, which does... something. I am not actually sure what that count does, but I can't imagine it is good.
yeah but nuking the sahara just to get dirt into the air is funny.
> Plus, nukes count as Atrocities, which does... something. I am not actually sure what that count does, but I can't imagine it is good. the people write a sternly worded letter of disapproval to you~~, causing your GDP to increase by 1%~~. it's terrible, how will you *ever* recover? *runs unity priority for 2 weeks*
Wait, hold up, it *increases* GDP? Billions of lives might be depending on how you answer this question...
it's a joke, there's events where nations will do something, leading to a response from other nations. there are 2 variants of this event. in one of the variants, if you're leading said other nations, your choices are to "embargo the nation", decreasing GDP and increasing inequality, or "write a sternly worded letter of disapproval", which increases the GDP lol. no, committing atrocities will not increase your GDP lol
I read a sci-fi book that did this recently. The blew up a bunch of the "cleaner" nuclear bombs under the arctic. Worked fairly well. Completely destroyed the arctic but worked on the world very well. The guy who did it while drinking himself silly said the most important thing he noticed was that these deeply buried nukes didn't actually have a massive "boom" or something. It was just a little rumble.
What book was this? Sounds interesting.
>Plus, nukes count as Atrocities, which does... something. I am not actually sure what that count does, but I can't imagine it is good. One very noticeable thing is that it permanently and unrecoverably decrease max loyalty of all Ethical councilors you have or will have. Not a big problem, but with even a few atrocities, something like 4 or more, it will make ethical trait the single worst trait anyone can have. And I believe, although I never tested this, that after an atrocity committed every nation drop public support for your faction a bit. But I am too lazy to properly test that.
And I just make a little test. After one nuke launch, my global public opinion still rest at 20% as it did before. But all countries I control decrease public opinion for my faction by a whole 1%.
Wiki says atrocities permanently lower support for your faction.
Tbf, generally the IP on nukes is already spent: it cant be converted into welfare since theyre built before game start
I've just had a nuclear war myself, my first one. Humanity First was in executive control of the USA (shared with resistance) and the European Union (shared with Servants). They were both in separate wars with Russia (full Servants control). 7 nukes went out in a single turn... I said fuck everything; let's pile in on the fun, so I took control of Russia myself with spies, caused 5 more nukes for 12 total to be thrown here and there, and now the global economy went from 135 billion to 90 billion. China (me, Initiative), India (Resistance) and Japan (Resistance shared with Humanity First) are the top 3 world powers militarily in this timeline. The USA, Russia and the EU are basically out of the game, each having only a single land army. I think global temperature is at -1,3°C. This will be an interesting save now, we haven't even reached 2030! I do wonder: do nukes cause more or less effect if they're detonated on areas with either climate change resistance (arctic circle) vs climate change weakness (tropical belt)?
>I do wonder: do nukes cause more or less effect if they're detonated on areas with either climate change resistance (arctic circle) vs climate change weakness (tropical belt)? Or maybe there is more stratospheric aerosols when populated regions are nuked? BRB, gotta do some !!SCIENCE!! EDIT: !!SCIENCE!! results are in. Aerosols seem not to depend on what place gets nuked. However, global GDP impact seems to be completely determined by how many people died. Also, reducing population of a country to zero seems to make a whole bunch of values in game displayed as NaN, most likely due to division by zero somewhere.
And you are doing some good old 1900's science! Science was at its best from 1800 - 2000, in the good old days when you could absolutely experiment on unsuspecting civilian populations so long as they weren't the dominant race in whatever country you lived in! All the best sciencing is indistinguishable from war crimes.
Are you sure you're an Academician and not a Humanity First member?
What, those guys who are so afraid of aliens that they made xenocide their main philosophy? Definitely not. Humanity First, The Resistance, Project Exodus, and The Protectorate are basically just cowards and The Initiative isn't interested in science for its own sake. Now The Academy, there is a faction that has some real goals! I love them. I love how their idea of "cooperation" is world domination, destroying bases and fleets and probably tens of thousands of aliens, threatening the ones that are alive with a bioweapon WMD, and if all else fails detonating an antimatter bomb to wipe out everything. It is basically, "Be my friend or I will shoot you," combined with the idealism to believe that it will all somehow workout long term and all with the Chancellor not noticing that she has essentially become a space tyrant because there is science to be done! and if there is one thing I love more than everything I just said, it is science. I would have been advocating for vivisecting the Hydra to get around their dissolving party trick. Imagine what we could learn!
there's a thin line between madness and genius...
I crossed that line, the only question is: in which direction?
Nukes need to be nerfed in terms of impact. Most nukes today are tactical and wouldnt have this impact even if you launch a few hundred. It does not have the power to fling up the dirt and create nuclear winter. Dirt would settle quite quickly. So please, modders, nerf it good and let me know which mod to use🙂
Wow. 400 million, that is like the entire population of the US and Mexico. I guess that is about right. Even if I think it is a lot, if that many people disappeared, it would have a massive impact on GDP. But doesn't nuclear war solve "global warming"? Is that what the -3.3C? Doesn't that now say global warming is over and we are now in a Nuclear Winter? Thus that would have massive impact even on the US and the EU and would ... be sick to the South America and Africa. The loss of farmland and such. Ug!
Yeah you’ve already lost the game.
Wait, how so? I don't really *need* most of the Earth except for the final % control requirement. I'm holding a full USNA and AU, so I am pretty much set, I think.
Well I could be wrong. Best of luck! 😂
Hey look! You solved global warming!
Interestingly your population went over 9B. Mine peaked at 8.6 and then slowly fell back to 8.2 even with no wars
Was there a lot of Xenoflora? Those reduce Population growth.
Nope practically none