I was using True Nukes 0.2.13 for a little bit until tonight, when I decided to try updating to the newer 0.3.x version to see if performance would improve. Even a 20t nuke took like 10 minutes to fully process on my 10-year-old PC, lool. A single thermobaric artillery shell took about 20 minutes for the game to become playable again.

I have to say, I'm REALLY impressed with the performance improvements. The difference is night and day. There's a lot of lag up front as expected upon the initial impact, but the game recovers within about 10-20 seconds, then performs a little sluggishly (but still quite playable) for a while as things dissipate. I LOVE this. Before, even 20t nukes were mostly a novelty since they were impractical to use for real due to their devastating impact on performance. Now I can start truly incorporating them into my strategies.

I've been playing with Rampant and have a massive vendetta against these insect bastards, so to finally be able to drop the hammer on them is so glorious, I can't get over how satisfying it is to see a huge cluster of Level 10 hives just eradicated instantly. Normally it would take dozens of 128mm cannon rounds to do the job. Not anymore! FUN TIMES HAVE BEGUN

I'm also impressed with the way you managed to somehow create a mod that works with... basically anything, as far as I can tell. Really great work, and thanks for the efforts!

If there's one complaint I had, it was that thermobarics were extremely expensive for how ineffective (against high-health rampant enemies, especially hives with over 200,000 health apiece) they were... but I haven't tried them with the newer version yet, and the

They were, however, still very effective at killing large hordes of Regenerative Biters, which are weak to fire (and almost nothing else). Other weapons would kill them, but it would take massive amounts of ordnance to do what one thermobaric shell could accomplish instead at far greater range than a flamethrower. The downside was, of course, performance impact if you hit a large, tightly-clustered group, but I still used them fairly regularly against big entrenched hives. But they were pretty much useless against every other type since they didn't do much damage to the nests and took forever to process against large groups of enemies, which was disappointing given their extreme cost (40 rocket fuel for a single cannon shell???).

I haven't tried them in the new version yet, but I also may have encountered a bug: I don't have any of the recipes available for them now. My existing 88mm thermobaric cannon rounds got ported over successfully, and I already had the thermobaric research complete, but I don't have the thermobaric small/medium/large canisters available, nor any munitions to use them. May just be a fluke since I didn't start a new game, but just a heads up. I'm not too bothered since now I can make proper nuclear weapons and those are VASTLY more devastating!

Anyway thanks again for the mod. Now I can truly have a shot at eradicating every last red blip on the map, which is my new post-rocket-launch goal at this point.

Yeah, the weapon prices are balanced against the base game enemies, and thermobarics are particularly designed to counter enemy bases, which makes their damage level very devastating throughout the game, as 1 or 2 can kill a large enemy base, only leaving a few biters which you can largely ignore.
But generally, with difficulty mods, they might be a little underpowered.

Yes, I think I messed up the migrations for thermobarics, to be honest I entirely forgot that. I'll have a look at fixing it asap.

Yeah no worries, I figured thermobarics were balanced for vanilla enemies! I wonder if some kind of damage scaling option might be worthwhile for mods' sake, or even researches to increase damage without changing blast characteristics.

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Another bug I noticed: I've unlocked most of the nuke tech now, but only have 15kt nuclear artillery shells available, even though I see smaller yields present in the Atomic Artillery Shells research which I've already completed. I'm guessing this is also something that won't happen in a fresh game, but just a heads up.

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The rest of this post may be more focused on True Nukes rather than Warheads, but...

For nuke tests, I'd also reeeeeeally like to have a remote detonate option! Even if it's an expensive and optional tool. I was hauling ass away from a 15kt detonation test in a hovercraft with nuclear fuel, moving at about 280kph, and I only got about 3km away before it went off. Took quite a bit of thermal damage from it, unsurprisingly. I'm afraid to test larger yields, lol. Maybe being able to build a concrete bunker you can hide in would be something? An immobile "vehicle" (so the player can be inside) made with lots of concrete and steel. Plop it down outside the main fireball radius, then wait, and you'll be OK.

This DID just give me the idea of building a "fuse" out of yellow belts and a burner inserter at the test site, though.... Or maybe a couple of crates full of wood, and a burner inserter moving them from one to the next, hooked up to a local circuit network. The inserter that adds the nuke to the test site doesn't activate until the second crate is full, treating the first one as a countdown timer. Might have to try that instead!

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One other detail I noticed that was pretty hilarious: nukes seem to cook fish in a tremendous radius, which you'd expect, but it also probably has a substantial impact on performance to iterate through all of those. Killing fish is definitely realistic, but just damaging them means it's processing possibly thousands of entities that it probably doesn't need to (could maybe just kill them outright if they are affected at all). Without having looked at the source code, I'm not sure how efficiently this is handled, though, so maybe it's a trivial amount of extra processing.

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Further on the performance subject, it might be nice to have an option to effectively disable the super-long-range minor thermal damage, like how detonating a 15kt nuke sets your whole base on fire even if you do it 3km away (had to go over 6km to avoid that, as the description suggested).

Example: I did a 15kt nuke test this far away from my entire base, as seen here on the far right, which managed to avoid damage. This is the farthest I've ever gone in Factorio to date, too:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1018935538817970259/1023328877881339964/unknown.png

Before, I'd done the test at half the distance, and it caused basically everything I built to take at least 1 point of damage. Again, certainly realistic from a scientific standpoint which I really enjoy, though from a gameplay perspective, I'm skeptical it's truly necessary.

The actual thermal flash damage from it is pretty mild, yet it's still plenty to make all your construction bots start scrambling to work repairing everything that took 1 point of damage, like walls, which can tank performance pretty bad. I did lose a few power poles, lamps, and even a couple of belts here and there, but ultimately not enough where it felt like the gameplay implications of detonating a 15kt nuke somewhat closer to home were significant enough to warrant all the extra processing. Maybe certain entities could be excluded, like walls, anything made with concrete or steel, etc? But anything lighter would be fair game. I'd also be willing to pay for a pricey research that adds lead shielding or something to weaker entities to exclude them from the blast wave so things like assembling machines, solar panels, batteries, etc. can be protected.

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Lastly, I noticed that the settings allowing you to reduce the blast radius for larger nukes is capped at 2. Is that for gameplay reasons, or technical? I thought about cutting the radius by a factor of 10 for the megaton-scale nukes so I can actually see them in a game without inviting game crashes, lol. But if that blast wave can only be halved, then anything greater than 1kt is still impractical for the most part.

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Oh, one other thing: the descriptions in the menu for "large" and Hiroshima-scale nukes could use ton/kiloton ratings listed for clarity so you know what ranges are affected by those settings.

Hope this is helpful feedback, and thanks again!

Hmm, yeah, maybe something like that. I'll have a think - I might just add a slider and let you balance the rest yourself.
In theory I could tie it to the flammables researches, its just it would get waaay too powerful for vanilla way to quickly that way.
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Yeah, I missed a step from my migrations, I'm going to do a release reasonably soon which should resolve all that.
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I can't easily add a remote detonator - I would do if it was readily possible, but I'd have to do it all in script and it would be a pain. I could suggest an inserter with circuit network for enabling it, but I'm still not sure how much it would help. You could build a timer using a ring of belts, and moving an item between two chests every time an item on the loop makes a rotation.
I'd say that a remote detonator is definitely a future addition, but not an immediate one - its a bit too much work, especially when the buildings are relatively limited use.
I did manage to escape the 100kt with a car, so I figured it wasn't too bad.
I've considered adding a 'fridge' for nuclear blast immunity, but never quite gotten around to it. It shouldn't be that hard - actually just making a vehicle which is immune to fire and explosive damage would do it. Honestly my biggest factor against it is that it would need graphics, and I'm terrible at graphics...
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I'll have a look at fish as a performance improvement - it might be worth me killing them more efficiently, although to be honest the biggest issue is things which create particles upon death, as the game then has to process several GB of particles which nobody will ever look at (1/3 of the performance after the detonation goes to the particle system, which I cannot prevent).
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I do find that just taking the hit to your base is fairly doable, although my PC isn't too shabby, so maybe I just get away with it. The lag you experience after the detonation is probably the blast wave travelling across the map, and while the drones all deploying is somewhat annoying, it generally isn't actually problematic - they'll spend a couple of minutes messing around, but it tends to fix itself reasonably quickly.
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Yeah, the scale down was quite an old feature, and made sense back then, with 2 being the point where it roughly stopped killing buildings (so more scaledown made it stop very abruptly), but then I made some performance improvements, and increased the blast range to compensate. I didn't however increase the max scaledown.
It is for pure gameplay reasons.
I'll increase the max to 5 or so - even that much should make a huge difference, as the issue is the area, so it grows quadratically.
I didn't actually allow scaledown on megaton+ scale on the basis that everything on almost any map is going to be hit anyway, unless you explored a really long narrow corridor... you are right though, it would be better with - I'm going to make the 100kt setting apply to it and everything beyond.
Side note to this, all these settings were somewhat broken.
Side side note, the settings didn't scale the thermal damage down at all - only the blast, as generally it was the biggest performance problem. Hence they didn't actually help with the problem you had. They'll now scale both. I've also fixed the naming.
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Generally I find that the game is more crash resistant than you'd give it credit for - even the largest maps don't freeze for more than a couple of minutes now, and there was a time when the 1Mt invited 10s of minutes of freeze, and yet the game still didn't crash - though I appreciate that going and doing something else while your game chews on the explosion isn't the most appealing...

I have personally found 15kt+ to be surprisingly practical - they were never intended to be so (originally they were a joke because of how devastating they were - how far this mod has come), but they are very good at clearing any huge areas you want to claim, and you fire so few that the damage isn't that noticeable - you end up with all your drones out, but it doesn't cost that much overall - particularly targetting remote areas which you want to move into.

Awesome, looking forward to the next iteration. And yeah you're right, the drones themselves don't really do much to performance... after all, you can have 50,000+ logistic drones zooming around and the game still runs fine. I think it was probably still the blast wave processing when I felt the slowdown during the 15kt test.

Totally understandable on not having a remote. After all, while typing that up I thought of some alternative methods that would work just as well (provided they don't get eaten before the countdown concludes). The electric discharge remote made me think it was a possibility, but honestly, the fact that it's not is actually kinda great -- it forces you to think outside the box and get creative, which is what Factorio is all about.

Actually I might be able to add a remote - the challenge will be making the controls intuitive or useful.
After all, its only useful if it can delay the nukes, so maybe have two remotes, one to start the other to stop? This is much worse since it will be hard to tell if the nuke is actually making progress towards detonation or not...
Besides this, its kinda fun with it being terrifying, and creativity is always good.

I've not added the remote, but the scale should be way more usable.