I have had the Idea of replacing Zenith with a hopefuly more interactable SW. A building that spawns a controlable Detriment every 5 minutes after the current one dies, the Det Spawner (name for reffernce not the actual name it should have in game).
The idea behind the Detriment Spawner is to have something with more counter play and interaction then a long range doom machine at base. By being semi-disposable the Detriment can be used more aggresively which the current 21k non respawning Det is discouraged from due to its large invesment and single life. For the defenders fighting agianst the super weapon, a large unit attacking you is a lot more interactable then a large artillary far out of reach. The hope is the Detriment Spawner will still do the job of ending the game by having a very strong unit constantly attacking, though my biggest fear is that by having more interactivity it will not be able to bring the game to a close due to being more counterable and slow.
For base stats of the building lets just make it a copy of Zenith's cost 38000, Health 9000. I don't know if it should have a power requirment cause losing power would probably just pause the respawn.
Mechanics: Upon costruction and powering a Detriment would be dropped or spawned nearby, probably on a designated spawn pad attached to the building. The Detriment would have all the same stats as normal and all abilities, it probably shouldnt be reclaimable as the point of this weapon is to encourage interactions, though it probably should drop the normal amount of metal on death as compensation to whoever gets nuked by it.
The Det Spawner would not start making or counting down untill the current Detriment is lost, once the current Detriment dies the Spawner will count down from 5 minutes and spawn a Detriment on reaching zero.
Spawning the Detriment does not cost anything.
The maximum Detriment amount is to dis-allow hoarding a bunch of Detriments and then sending them all at once to end the game.
The current respawn time is arbitrary, but the idea is to encourage still taking some care to not lose the Detriment and to discourage just using it as an unblockable nuke. It also means that killing the Detriment is rewarded with a little bit of breathing room for the defenders.
Edge cases: What happens if the defenders stun the Detriment permanently and drag it off to the back of their base? Does that mean the Detriment Spawner just never respawns a new Detriment? Is this a problem? I see a few options.
1: The Detriment is just stunned and isn't respawned.
2: A self-destruct status bar slowly fills up on a fully stunned Detriment that kills it if its stunned for too long. The Bar slowly decays if it is unstunned to prevent just unstunning the Detriment for a second to reset the timer.
3: Same as two but instead of self-destructing the Detriment spawner just starts making a new Detriment and ignores the previous one as if it was just a conventionaly made detriment
For this itteration of the Detriment Spawner I would go with option 3.
Another issue is what if it gets captured? I would say the captured Detriment starts building up a status. If the status ever fills completely the Detriment spawner treats the captured Detriment as if it had died, and starts counting down to a new Detriment.
So what are the thoughts on having a building like this in the base game? Would it be better, worse or just diffrent then the current super weapons?
