ICBMs

[bvanevery]

Anyone else think it's completely stupid that once you've achieved Orbital Spaceflight, you cannot just hit anywhere on Planet with a buster?  Lame, lame, lame, completely lame.  Don't talk to me about multiplayer.  I'm going to modify Planet Busters to be able to hit everything if I can.  That will make players take the space race and orbital defense rather seriously.  Ideally one would have some kind of automatic retalliation capability but I doubt there's any way to implement that.  Maybe some "missile launcher" transport units would do the trick, so that they can be hidden places and not easily seen by enemy players.  Not sure I can restrict a transport to a single unit type though.  In the worst case I just profess not to care about multiplayer fairness at all, and do what needs to be done to make single player realistic.

I don't think Conventional Missiles are problematic because I imagine them to be shorter range missiles with smaller payloads.  Maybe they should be cheaper to produce though.  Another good question would be, why should you have to wait for Orbital Spaceflight to do those?  Maybe you should only need Doctrine: Air Power.

[Buster's Uncle]

No, your point actually make every bit of sense.

[bvanevery]

I'm not sure there's a way to give anything orbital insertion capability, before one has the appropriate technologies.  Even if that was possible, it wouldn't work over the oceans, making it unacceptable.  It also wouldn't work in the presence of Aerospace Complexes, and that shouldn't be a defense against a Planet Buster.

What I can do, is increase the range of a Missile chassis to 128, I think.  That would allow a Missile to hit anywhere on Planet up to a map size of 256x256.  Haven't tried it yet though, to see if the range goes that high.

The problem is I seem to have only one missile chassis type to work with.  I want two.  One for short range, one for intercontinental range.  In the #CHASSIS section of alphax.txt I've tried adding an "ICBM" but nothing shows up in the game.

Worst case, I could accept the loss of Conventional Missiles as we know them, in favor of ICBMs.  CMs are just annoying crap that the AI spews at me anyways.  I never use them, because they're not value for the production money.  Also they take too many mouseclicks to produce and use, and make people unhappy under Free Market.

Making a land missile launcher should be pretty easy.  Just put a carrier deck on a land unit, problem solved.  In my "Realism" mod I've made it easy to put carrier decks on anything.  It only requires Doctrine:Air Power, not some goofy advanced wonder technology.

[bvanevery]

The maximum speed of a Missile chassis seems to be 99.  Even if one has modifiers from Fusion Power, The Cloudbase Academy, etc. it is still capped at 99.  However one could increase the range of a Missile chassis to any practical limit, before it must return to base and refuel.  This can enable hitting anywhere on any planet, it's just a question of how many turns the flight takes.  Theoretically, one could do defense intercept against such missiles.  In practice, nobody is likely to have an air umbrella that good.