There were 2 versions of that that I played.

On involved putting a unit (scv) on the 2ndary healing location so you get global heal of all your units. The other had a very fast build time of medics that you could use to heal everything and only cost 250 minerals. My strategy there was to upgrade armor up to around 100 and farm as much as possible. I believe you could activate multiple spawns, which made things easy. The upgraded durans may have done 200 damage each, but again, when you already have 200 armor that's nothing.

I enjoy my Marines Special Forces without the mass spam of units and infinite heals like most modern versions attempted, especially the ones in Starcraft 2. And I prefer it to stick to only marines. Trying to bother with firebats, ghosts, tanks, goliaths, air units and even prottoss is a pain in the ass. It means you have to upgrade all over again, which means being careful what spawns you waste/kill and being careful not to get all your units killed otherwise there goes all your money down the drain, that's the real gist of the game which bothers me. It turns into a crappy arcade where you have to be careful to not lose all your powerups/money. The gold to mineral convertion while adding to the campy atmosphere, only shows you how cheap gold is. 5000 gold for a spire means 500 minerals, when a marine costs around 6-8k minerals.

I was hoping for multiple locations with both healing and gold converting. Once you get like 12 fully upgraded raynors, you don't need to camp at the heal anymore. Some base building and bunkers which aren't useless, a better scripted events without massive spawns on top of you,
Some better terrain and a less linear feel. I enjoyed the canyon parts. The less spam/war gameplay could be fixed by limiting the units per player and adding more quests/events which don't involve massive spawns or 1hit kill kerrigans.

There was another hard map involving surviving on a zerg hostile planet and slowly upgrading. It was called "Lost Technology" by some german guy. It had a PvP version and a singleplayer version.

Oh I loved that map. Was made by Simon Kobschätzky ( DasGlueck ). You sure it was single player? I seem to remember it was coop.

There was a PvP version with 3 vs 3 players and in the middle there were zerg, there were far more lenient. Each player would take a role: builder, infantry, mechanical.
Then there was a player vs AI coop 3-player version where the zerg would attack you more often. You could send a small squad on a mission on a tiny island to retrieve technology.

There were a bunch of ideas I haven't seen attempted in Starcraft 1. For example SC2 took The Thing map in a more zombie survival genre rather than the killer, the leech, the alien which were the first maps before the thing. Warcraft 3, Armor Games and Newgrounds have a huge amount of game ideas which could work in SC1.

I'm thinking of taking ideas from other games. Especially the upgrade game genre created on Armor Games.
http://armorgames.com/category/upgrade-games

One more bump.

The one I'm thinking of looked like this: https://i.imgur.com/QB3Zsxd.png
Probably made in SC Xtra Editors. It pre-dated SCMDraft, Cat and Mouse, and Impossible Scenarios. Cops and Robbers was one of the most popular maps during the time. If you died, you could be rescued if someone was able to touch your flag in the middle. There was also a random warp gate on the north side of the map where a ton of observers would patrol to en mass.

Oh man the D&D games were my bread and butter. I tried making an rpg reminescent of this a while ago, ended up being my last unfinished map before I stopped playing BW.

What those maps really needed was an extensive weapon/ability system so both the DM and heroes can have engaging encounters. I'm also thinking of a turn based combat system to keep it in line with the source material. The hard part in those maps was always to design a good story and fun encounters fast enough so the players wouldn't get bored.

I know Staredit.net focuses more on the technical design rather than the game design, but I'll still ask it here. I have a The Thing/Mafia styled map in mind.
I have 2 forceful game mechanics in mind designed to make at least two players stick together. The problem is that automatically the betrayer will just kill them 1 by 1, it's only a matter of time. It turns into a sudden death styled map.

In the first one if you don't stay near a player to keep your paranoia bar low then your HP goes to 10%. (or worse, you die instantly)
In the second one every 3 minutes the players can choose to level each other up to get stronger than the killer, but if leveled up the killer gets 3x stronger rather than +1x as a normal player.
Any design ideas on how to not turn this into a sudden death match?


Meanwhile I'd like to mention Hotel Murderer. I've had infinitely more fun with it due to the voting system and high player interaction where they blame each other. Compared to The Thing where everyone stays silent for 30 minutes and either goes solo or tries to form 1 large group to prevent the thing from winning.
I originally thought the killer being able to enter just 1 room per night was going to make the map boring, but apparently it's designed that way to force the killer to follow the players and to let the players know who followed them in order to vote him off. Same for the evidence and flashlights showing objectively who isn't the killer, I thought it was going to make it too obvious. Same with the killer requiring to kill just 4 players instead of 7.
I didn't think a seemingly amateur map like Hotel Murderer which couldn't even add a "choose your side" option in the beginning could ever be so effective. The map can't even detect when there aren't enough players. Very simple yet effective mechanics.

I was in a situation like this about a year ago. You can listen to my story if you want some help.

In response to seeing lots of bad "The Thing" maps being hosted, I set out to create a new game with similar objectives and play. The biggest focus I wanted it to have was variety. I threw out the basic "7 marines vs 1 zergling in disguise" and added in lots of fresh mechanics and content. I allowed people to choose from various weapons, skills, and upgrades, thus allowing dozens of playstyles and improving replayability. The next step was getting story. I chose to base the map off of "Trouble in Terrorist Town" because it is a very popular mode in Garry's Mod, and it gave the map a "Modern Warfare" tone. Thus, the weapons, skills, and upgrades also received a modernized theme.
Though I only got a few ratings, they were overwhelmingly positive, later pushing me to EUD-ify the map.
View the final result here: http://www.staredit.net/topic/17499/

All that said, my pro tips are variety and replayability.

I started a super in-depth Minitown D Remake, but at the same time I was working on that I was learning the basics to EUD's. So the things I was capable then and now are vastly different. I would need to basically start from scratch as functionality wise with EUDs I can do the things I was making work with really complex trigger interactions much simpler mechanics since I have access to changing unit variables like killscore or being able to make triggers that can modify kill amount. However, I have less time than I used to so its hard to work on a few maps simultaneously and make good progress solo. I could focus on one map but I tend to work best jumping around when I reach a slow period on one map.

I was going to remake Special Forces for that remake contest we had a while back, but I got nowhere with it. The general idea what to make it much "tactical", kinda, instead of just walking around with a 100-ups marine killing everything. I thought about adding abilities, like calling in air strikes or ordinance drops. That's pretty much all I thought of, so I'd need to think of more to actually make the map worth anything.

As long as the core gameplay is still walking around with a 100-ups marine killing everything, it's fine. Probably should add more risk/reward opportunities. Like foes that can quickly kill you, but are worth a lot of points. And maybe counter attack waves where you need to hold a ramp together to not get swarmed to foster teamplay.