We used to have it where they'd make the resource disappear from the tile completely! That was found to be a bit too hateful.
Yes - that is harsh - but when my tile gets down to 'trace' amounts, it is almost as if it is gone! lol - I think my water pump was bringing in .25 water/s lol. And it was alone in the middle of no where. I ended up scraping it and just putting a solar panel there.
Would you guys ever consider an option to move claims? - Have it as another black market item. A way of clearing out very useless tiles?
Personally I love them for the reasons you hate them - they have a permanent effect on the landscape which causes the game to shift unexpectedly, and forces players to adapt.
I do agree that they are extremely powerful though. A simple change would be to have them only reduce 1 level of a tile instead of 2, so that they're not quite as devastating. But there is something cool about nuking away the planet's resources to create supply shortages. I guess the important thing is to be wary of exploiting level3 resource tiles that are isolated. At least if a lvl3 is surrounded by the same resource it'll still get adjacency bonuses after being nuked. I played a MP game just now with extremely small amounts of aluminium, I had one of the lvl3s and nuked the only other one. Made a killing selling Aluminum all game, but has to pretty much spend every black market cooldown on a goon squad to keep it alive.
Thanks for reply - you make a good point - it does add an interesting dynamic to the game. Don't get me wrong, I used them for my own good several times against the AI - the same water game I am talking about, I invested hard into ice condensers after my main water tile got nuked down to nothing. So I nuked down the other high water tiles too... drove up water prices. In the end we were all suffering from food and water shortages, but I was the most prepared lol.
I'd rather see them knocking down only 1 level too - for the cost, that is more reasonable - would it be too far to ask that a tile can only be nuked once?