The Mothership

Directive confirmed. As all are one. These are some of the words spoken by the first flagship to be released on the StarCraft II website, the Protoss Mothership. The Mothership currently features three unique abilities such as a cloaking field, which cloaks units and buildings as well and also a powerful weapon called the Planet Cracker.

The Mothership was first seen at the 2007 World Wide Invitational in Korea where Blizzard had unveiled StarCraft II. Back then the Mothership was a force to be reckoned with and was only limited to one per army. That has since changed and now it seems you may be able to create more than just one for your army. Because of this, a previously known spell, the Black Hole, was removed. This spell allowed the Mothership to create a black hole which sucked in all air units within its range. Having a fleet of Motherships with enough energy for each to use a Black Hole would have meant doom for any fleet of air units.

Spells and abilities
The spell that the Mothership did retain from its debut was the Planet Cracker. This spell is seen being inflicted on a Terran base by two Motherships on the StarCraft II website. One is seen beaming through the mineral line and the other over a Terran Command Center. The Command center is set aflame and SCVs are sent to their doom. A new ability that has been added to the Mothership since its debut is a Cloaking field which allows it to cloak all units including buildings. However, the Mothership seems to lose it's ability to attack while providing the cloaking field. The last ability to mention is the Time Bomb. It is a stasis without providing invulnerability. It renders all projectile weapons in its field useless as the Time Bomb slows down all incoming weapons fire and eventually stopping them.

Mothership under fire
The Mothership has faced harsh criticisms from many players, but has also garnered much support especially from those who have played the demo at Blizzcon. On the Battle.net forums for StarCraft II a post had recently been made detailing the results of the first RTS Community Summit held at Blizzcon. In continuing with their efforts to further communications with the StarCraft Community, Blizzard has implemented Monthly Discussion Topics, "in which the community as a whole, including all our popular StarCraft fansites, will work together in consolidating fan feedback for the developers, so we really get the voice of the fans heard here at Blizzard." All the sites involved will provide their own unique questions to their own visitors where their feedback will be sent back to Blizzard's development team.

With the new discussion topics and the creation of such a controversial unit, the Mothership could turn out to be one of the most talked about units in StarCraft II. Then again, the Zerg have still yet to be unveiled, but for certain the Mothership discussion topics could prove again how well Blizzard listens to the community.

Links
StarCraft II - Source and Info
Battle.net - Monthly Discussion: Mothership