50 seconds.

[Bad Intel]

This is my own personal Bad-Intel-proof procedure for landing ten (or less) salvos of six simultaneous nukes over someone's business using silos.

The basic principle is this. Place two silos as close as possible. Make sure they're lined up with your intended target. Launch a nuke to the target from the farther silo. Wait 50 seconds. Launch a nuke from the second silo to the same target. Both nukes should arrive on target at just about the same time.

Now to step it up to your 6 silos, place them all in as close a perfect line as possible and as close together as possible. The whole line should be more or less aligned with your chosen target area (population cluster, enemy silo grid).

When the time comes to 'drop your pants', I wait for the second counter on the clock to hit 00 to make it easier to execute. At 00 second, click your farthest silo from target into nuke mode. You have 50 seconds to queue up destinations. It's important here that you remember the specific order you're queuing up your nukes.

When the second counter hits 50 seconds, flip the second farthest to nuke mode. Repeat the exact same sequence of queuing for it. Again, you have 50 seconds. The timer will have ticked over to the next minute so watch for the second counter to indicate 40 seconds. Flip over the third farthest. Queue the nukes. 30 seconds on the clock. Flip the fourth farthest. 20 seconds. The fifth. 10 seconds. The last and closest to target.

Now sit back and watch your nukes cluster together into groups of six as they hit their targets usually within a minute of each other.

With practice, I've gotten to the point of executing it cleanly at speed 2.

As usual, have some bombers up over water and keep those backstab subs at the ready..

[Gen. Ripper]

I find the best way is to deploy your silos as ever you wish, depending on your target, you can predict the curves, all you have to do if fire them in the correct order,

IE - Say you have 6 silos in SA, targeting for the EU, you have 3 near Sao Palo, 1 near lima, and a couple just below central america, pritty well spread eh?

Start with the most southern Silo, fire, and then you can queue your targets as normal with the single silo, get the rest ready, if you imagine a line extending horizontal from each silo, the second your first ICBM touches that line, then fire which ever silo's are on that line....repeat (so long as you target in the exact same order for each silo, then where ever the silos are on your territory they will land together)

[Bad Intel]

General, that's exactly how I used to execute my launches too. I was just never able to get them tight enough. Maybe I'm just no good at eyeballing the timing by trying to figure out imaginary lines and deciding where the center of a nuke is.

First, I don't know if anyone's mentionned this here but I've determined that one hash mark on a moving unit's.. con trail? dashed line? is just about 20 seconds. Knowing this, if you look at the trails of nukes, the hashes get longer near the end of their arc. I'm pretty sure this means that nukes accelerate as they advance along to the target.

I think this is what's throwing off my timing when I try to eyeball it like you describe. When a nuke is parallel to the next launch site with respect to the target, it's actually farther along on this acceleration curve. So even though they launch at the same time from the same distance to target, one nuke will still land a bit sooner then the other.

The technique I'm describing seems to takes this weird factor out of the equation. All you need to do is keep an eye on the clock and queue up nukes as fast as you can. No time wasted waiting for the geometry to be just right. I find that I can execute the whole launch while still doing all kinds of other micro. Best of all, I consistently have nuke clusters landing withing seconds of each other. When they're flying, they're usually superimposed on each other. I could never get that before, just eyeballing it.

There's also a second benefit. I noticed that when I would launch with my silos layed out all over my territory, I would only get good accuracy for the first few nukes leaving each silo. There seems to be some kind of timing drift that happens as the timing you prepared for the first targets is the same one used on the last targets that would be farther away. Since silos are very close together with the technique, it tends to minimise the effect again. There's still a bit of drift, but it's way less then what I would get before.

You can minimize it even more by aligning your silo placement line towards the 'center of mass' of your target cluster. This means the first few and last few nukes acquire the timing drift but the magnitude of it drops by 2 for both ends.

And for those with a bend for trigonometry, you can figure out how much to reduce the 50 second figure with respect to any other launch angle from the straight line placement of your silos.

Here's a hint: cos(degree(angle))*50

Ouch, I just hurt my dork muscle.

[Smiling Buddha]

First, I don't know if anyone's mentionned this here but I've determined that one hash mark on a moving unit's.. con trail? dashed line? is just about 20 seconds. Knowing this, if you look at the trails of nukes, the hashes get longer near the end of their arc. I'm pretty sure this means that nukes accelerate as they advance along to the target.

I highly doubt that nukes accelerate.

There's also a second benefit. I noticed that when I would launch with my silos layed out all over my territory

No one does that.

I would only get good accuracy for the first few nukes leaving each silo. There seems to be some kind of timing drift that happens as the timing you prepared for the first targets is the same one used on the last targets that would be farther away.

This is because the further away from the target you are, the larger the impact of a mistiming, however slight.

You can minimize it even more by aligning your silo placement line towards the 'center of mass' of your target cluster. This means the first few and last few nukes acquire the timing drift but the magnitude of it drops by 2 for both ends.

How is that possibly measurable? You've just made that up.[/quote]

[Hyperion]

Have to agree with buddha. I made a thread to ask if respective units speeds and nuke speeds were known, i don't believe the nukes can be known and anyway, you can't otherthink everything in the game. Just keep your silos close. E.g. You're Africa...enemy is Europe. Launch from your lowest most eastern silo first, and keep launching in that order from east to west in terms of silo placements until you reach your highest silos.

Doesn't matter if all nukes impact at the same time in a cluster. Infact it is worse and i will tell you why:

1. If you launch as ive said you get 6 nukes (1 from each silo), all at the same target at slightly different levels of altitudes/arc vectors inbound. The first nukes (say 1 or 2) of the first 6 salvo distract ALL AA guns within firing radius (ALL silos in Europe usually) whilst the rest pass through to their target, they will always pass through because the AA silos don't target individual nukes, they all target the first and only nuke to enter their firing perimeter and keep targetting this nuke until it is destroyed or impacts.

2. Because of this fact, after you lose maybe 3 nukes of the first 6 salvo, the remaining nukes hit their target...but the second 6 nuke salvo is already incoming and the nukes from the first salvo are still drawing AA gun fire because they all fired at different times and not clusters, theyre still in the air towards a now dead target, thus increasing your percentage of being able to hit your next targets and with more efficiancy with each new salvo as the AA guns can't keep up. This works best against Europe because all silos are almost always guarenteed to be firing at the first nuke to come near Europe because of its small surface area.

3. The only way your tactic of timing nuke clusters is any good is if you plan to pass your nukes through another enemy territory to hit a destination on the far side of the globe or when ocean nuking a stationary fleet.

[xander]

1. If you launch as ive said you get 6 nukes (1 from each silo), all at the same target at slightly different levels of altitudes/arc vectors inbound. The first nukes (say 1 or 2) of the first 6 salvo distract ALL AA guns within firing radius (ALL silos in Europe usually) whilst the rest pass through to their target, they will always pass through because the AA silos don't target individual nukes, they all target the first and only nuke to enter their firing perimeter and keep targetting this nuke until it is destroyed or impacts.

It used to be possible to manually target silos to attack different nukes. This functionality was broken in 1.4.x. I do mean "broken," and not "removed." Right now, you can pick a silo and tell it to target a particular nuke. It will look like it is targeting that nuke -- i.e. there will be a red line extending from the silo to the nuke, and the queue will reflect that there are shots ready to go -- but no shots will be fired until the entire manual queue has been cleared. Thus, if you try to manually target a silo, it will cease to function until enough time has passed to hit all of the nukes that you manually targeted. So, this is broken behaviour, rather than removed behaviour. I hope this is fixed soon, and have reported it to the Mac beta list, and these forums.

xander

[Bad Intel]

I highly doubt that nukes accelerate.

I highly doubt they don't.

you can't otherthink everything in the game

Sure I can. You're not my mother.

The only way your tactic of timing nuke clusters is any good is if (...)

Works great for me. I get fuller, more luscious launches with less flakes. And look at this colour!

[Hyperion]

Lol fair enough, youre more than welcome to play that cluster tactic against me.