In the recent Patches mod that is popular for the time being, there is an attempt at improving nukes by reducing their build time, cost, and casting time at the expense of less damage and a bigger red dot. I think this is a good attempt, but misses the boat in that using nukes is annoying with the current mechanics. In the original Command and Conquer (one of the first multiplayer RTS games) you would have nukes as the Brotherhood of Nod and an Ion Cannon as the Global Defense Initiative. The way these worked was that once you built the necessary infrastructure, the super weapon (nuke or ion cannon) would work like a Yamato Weapon for the Battlecruiser with a large cast time and then a significant cooldown time and you could only have one at a time and you didn’t have to think about paying money to restock the weapon, rather you just had to wait for the cooldown to finish after each use. You could also use the weapon anywhere on the map you had vision. The mechanics were roughly the same in sequels, but the user experience I feel was a lot better to Terran nukes fired by a Ghost.
I propose that since nukes are almost never used anyways, the following should happen regarding nukes:
(1) Command Centers can be turned into a new building called a nuclear silo (kind of like you had in Starcraft 1). Once built this nuclear silo would produce nukes on cooldown which might be once every 2 minutes for instance (it would need to be balanced through testing obviously).
(2) Like the Mothership, you can only have one nuclear silo at a time. There would be obvious balance concerns if you could produce multiple silos where the nukes don’t cost any gas or minerals, just like there would be big balance concerns with Motherships where you could recall and cloak your entire army multiple times in succession around the entire map.
(3) The casting range for the nuke without the aid of a spotter (Ghost) would be a radius maybe 50% wider than the detection range for a current sensor tower with the intent of this weapon being able to be used defensively without the aid of a Ghost. If the nuke is used beyond this range, you need to have a Ghost be used as a spotter just like you do now.
(4) Also, the time for the nuke to fall would be proportional to the distance of the nuclear silo. This means it would be quicker to launch and land near your base and take significantly longer to land (where you can kill the Ghost and interrupt the nuke). The idea of not needing a Ghost for a short range firing of the nuke is not necessary and just an idea, but the time to land should be variable depending on the distance of the silo from the target location.
(5) Finally, just like a Mothership is very expensive and costs a lot of supply, the same relative concerns should be applied to the Nuclear Silo in that an upgrade from a command center would cost just about as much and you probably should need a fusion core as a prerequisite rather than just a Ghost Academy. Rushing this weapon out should be a difficult journey through the tech-tree just like Mothership rushes are so you can’t just show up in someone’s base and nuke away in 5 minutes. You can do this right now with the current mechanics but it is impractical in a serious game because of the gas costs of ghosts, cloak research, the silos, and a requirement for an armory (which requires a factory first) to build the nuke.
As for giving Zerg some love so they don’t whine about potential attrition tactics with free nukes over a very long game, perhaps you could have a hive upgrade where you could farm/consume creep tumors for minerals (not gas). This way you couldn’t just starve a zerg out of existence as you camp your base and just do hit and run attacks to wither down the army while launching nukes. As for Protoss, maybe the Mothership could be given the Purifier back (commonly called the Planet Cracker in beta) with the idea this ability would not be instantly available upon building the mothership (i.e. the cooldown starts once it is built) and that the ability would have a very long cooldown. This ability would be analogous to the C&C Ion Cannon which was a lot of fun back in the days. I would replace time warp with this ability or else add it as a fourth ability since time warp is kind of a lame and not very fun ability as most debuff abilities are in SC2 such as anti-armor missile.
The reason I am posting this idea is that I think SC2 needs actual cool stuff in the next patch as the most recent patch has put the game on life support whether Blizzard wants to admit it or not. Again these are just ideas to spice the game up with more powerful and functionally easier to use strategic weapons/abilities that make you feel good when you use them. In spite of earlier versions of SC2 being famous for cheeses and imbalances, a recent criticism has been that the game has just been overbalanced so that everything is a soft counter and you don’t have the right balance powerful fun abilities that have hard counters. So Making Nukes Great Again (well they never were great to be honest) would be a good start.
