Please correct me if I am wrong, but I think Patches mod is intended to be experimental for others to test out as he had it developed before the 5.0.16 patches were released rather than a mod intended to replace 5.0.16 or else try and humiliate Blizzard in some way. I think he has some decent to good ideas, but as a former mod maker myself for RTS games coming up with new ideas that people love is very hard and it is far easier to come up with ideas that everyone hates. There are some general things I have learned myself as to what MOST people like and dislike in RTS games and if you deviate too far from this, people get upset.
(1) Most RTS players dislike heroes whether that be in WC3 or ZeroSpace. Trying to pull DOTA/LoL players into RTS rarely works. The problem with heroes is that it encourages mass unit balls where only tactics matter, rather than the option of dispersed armies deployed more strategically. This of course is a preference and enormous numbers of Starcraft/Brood War players were upset with Blizzsard when WC3 came out because of the hero concept being employed when Warcraft 2 had no hero concept at all and even had ships.
(2) You need to have the right balance between hard counters and soft counters. For example, zerglings do a lot of damage for their cost but have poor health and die instantly to splash damage weapons, whereas in WC3 or even ZeroSpace, unit health and survivability for even tier 1 units is on par with an immortal. This means longer battles where microing is far more important than macroing, but in terms of the user experience battles are too drawn out and mentally exhausting. I had my own formula I designed for unit balance relative to user engagement I came up with many years ago, but generally you want a wide diversity in hard and soft counters to make games interesting in RTS. Right now the current Meta for SC2 is there are not really as many hard counters anymore due to certain powerful and fun units being nerfed to death, rather than giving other races buffs in the counter units or unit combos to deal with powerful units.
(3) Using units and abilities should be quick and easy to use. This is a big negative to how SC2 works, though fortunately you can remap your hotkeys to a setup that is more efficient if you want to. Some people like to point out how incredible the APM of a lot of players is for SC2 and I would say the fact these “elite” players feel they need to mash their buttons that fast shows poor user interface design. Distracting players through multiple attacks to tax their mental resources is a fundamental part of RTS, but rewarding players who don’t mind getting carpal tunnel syndrome like Byun by making the control of the game inefficient turns off a lot of introductory players (noobs) who might actually get good at the game if they stick with it for a while. Automating too much is not great either, as it makes the game feel lethargic but a good game design will have players topping out at 200 APM rather than 400-600 APM for an RTS game here you need to control multiple groups (armies) at a time. The WC3 hero style with less focus on macro obviously requires a lot less APM which is why some people prefer that type of design so the right balance needs to be there for the game to be ultimately fun.
(4) Units and abilities have to be fun and you need certain high-tech units that strike fear in the other player in which if they are caught off guard they need to scramble a multi-unit counter to immediately. If you don’t have “Oh Crap Here Comes This Slow Unit of Epic Doom Feeling” then a lot of the drama is lost in an RTS game. These units should not be resurrectable hero units which get stronger over time, but units like the Mothership which have long range and are not just a glorified Arbiter from Brood War. I don’t mean cheesy tech rushes that rely on obfuscation like DT rushes, but rather the interplay between how you might have units like infestors which debuff a powerful unit like a Carrier or BC so that other units which normally would be ineffective at killing that high-tech unit can kill them. Battlecruisers and Carriers at the moment are not fearsome in and of themselves and should probably be 8 supply units with an additional ability, more armor, and more health. They should be a very strong unit on their own that you mix into a complex army rather than a unit you mass. Kind of like in the Warhammer Universe where you don’t really have entire legions of Titans, rather the Titans are support for whatever your main army is. In classic tank warfare before the age of drones, tanks were always supported by infantry or else some guy with a shoulder fired anti-tank weapon could take out all of your expensive tanks easily. This mechanic is good in SC2 with marine/tank but the idea isn’t really the same for a lot of other units, especially with Protoss where you have dumb units like the Immortal which in theory are supposed to charge first with their hardened shields and require micro, but really are just an A-move unit most of the time. In Brood War Carriers had a lot more micro potential and were far superior in terms of tactics and fun to the SC2 Carrier. The more actual freedom you give your users with powerful units, the more fun the game is going to be provided you balance the counters to those super units effectively.
(5) Every game should not be an epic long game or else the saying “It’s just another SH*TTY day in Paradise” applies. Frustrating cheese of course should be counterable that ends the game super fast, but the average time for a game should be 15 minutes tops with most games being between 10 and 20 minutes. Without enough hard counters as mentioned above and only having soft counters means you are going to have turtling and wars of attrition which is more like Age of Empires which has its fans but will turn off people who don’t have a huge amount of time to dedicate to very long games.
(6) One of the biggest and most ignored features of gameplay is a wide array of unit speed. You want to have extremely fast to the point of imbalance units that just feel awesome to use, but are expensive and fragile while also having your slower lumbering infantry units as well. I found that when I made units slower with more health one time in a mod I made, everyone hated it. People really do like the zerg style of play with fast zergling type units. Protoss and Terran could really be improved in terms of fun if they had more speedy harassment units (Banshees are all that Terran has at the moment and Phoenixes are kinda lame to be honest).
(7) When doing one of my mods, I just kept adding new abilities and spells because it was fun for me as a designer while overlooking whether this is actually fun for the end user. In the end all that adding tons of abilities and spells to each unit just kind of added too much to the game and just caused unnecessary user stress because giving user’s too many choices of abilities per unit type causes this kind of paradoxical psychological stress which has been proven in experiments with regards to consumers shopping for grocery items. If consumers have more than 5 choices, then they will become stressed and often not buy anything. For RTS you usually want units to have at most two abilities and if you need to fire more abilities in, then you create a new type of unit. It also makes accidental firings of the wrong ability less common. If you do have three abilities per unit type, then one of them needs to be passive or very easy to use. For example, having Banshees lose energy over time while cloaked is fine because they have no other abilities but the interplay between Ghosts losing energy and saving energy for their actual abilities is stressful to the user which is why I think you should have a fixed cost for cloak per casting and a fixed cloaking time. Better yet, just make Ghost cloak like the mothership cloak in that it doesn’t cost energy at all and has a fixed duration and cooldown. This would make the Ghost much more enjoyable to use and easier to balance with the energy costs of its other abilities.
This is a little off topic, but I think Blizzard has one shot at getting their Starcraft peeps back and redeeming themselves in the next patch because objectively this latest patch has been a disaster for the player base, especially since SC2 streamers and content creators on YouTube have been doing less and less SC2 content and making more and more Zerospace content. Like I said before, I don’t like heroes in RTS games and Zerospace looks really good but it is not my cup of tea at the moment. It is only in alpha now and I am older and don’t have time to play 5 different games these days so I just do SC2 when I have the time. I think most of the player base is in the same boat as me these days when it comes to the amount of time they are willing to invest in new games.
