Shack: So on to an entirely different part of the game, nukes are obviously very powerful but there are presumably countermeasures and vast amounts of efforts that must be expended to use them. What's the system around that?

Chris Taylor: Well, I love nukes. I love nukes that do massive amounts of damage, but like anything there should be an easy way to counter it--relatively easy--meaning that if you build nukes, and your opponent builds anti-nukes you're never going to win the game that way. What people forget, though, in terms of strategy, is that nukes are not just meant to knock out your opponent's base. Let's take a scenario. I build up nukes, and you build anti-nukes. I fire five of them at you, and you knock them out of the air, and for every dollar I spend on the nukes you spend twenty cents. I'm losing this arms race. However, when you think you've got me beat, you have this invading army leaving your base and there's no anti-nuke capability escorting that massive army, and I drop a nuke on them and you say, "Oh."

As a strategist, I like to create what I call a red herring system, where people do something because they think it's going to be a slam dunk, and then they realize it isn't. That creates a lot of deeper strategies, because people start to say, "Well, my friend is not going to think I'm going to build nukes, because he knows that I'm going to build anti-nukes, which means he's probably not going to build nukes, which means I'm not going to bother building anti-nukes." You get into this whole "I know that you know that I know that you don't know" rabbit hole, which allows these chess-like games to evolve. You'll find the guy nuking the other guy and he'll say, "I can't believe you built nukes! You never build nukes! I've played you twenty times and you've never built nukes! Where did this nuke comes from?" and the first guy says, "Exactly." [laughs] It's just fun. It takes the game to a whole new place.

Then you can also drop nukes on ships in the ocean, and someone might say, "God, I never thought about you knocking out my ships with a nuke, I should never have kept them still," because if the ships are always moving you can never hit them. You'd never know where they're going to go. A nuke takes quite a while to get across a world, a nuke is in the air for a minute or two minutes, and you could move the slowest thing in that time. Nukes just really dress the game up and take it to a very exciting and interesting place.

Now, of course we have shield systems too, which take out all of your traditional projectiles--long range artillery can be protected against, the shields absorb various impacts. Then there are sorts of cool countermeasure systems. You've got stealth field generators, you've got spooking systems for your mobile units that can make it look like there's a massive army approaching on radar when there isn't, and so on and so forth. There are a lot of systems that make it all come together in interesting ways.