Nuke build times

I just bought FA via Impulse. I last played original supcom some times ago and there are a few things that I could be remembering incorrectly. But I'm pretty sure nukes used to build much, much, MUCH faster. Is this so?
I remember a mission in the original supcom campaign where you had to build strategic missile defenses in 3 locations within about 5 minutes of the start of the mission. I just played the first FA campaign mission (great mission btw, nicely designed). I decided to go nukes just for fun, but they were taking a while to build. I had plenty of mass, plenty of energy, and dozens of T3 engineers assisting, but it was still taking forever.
I actually had time to divert about 20 engineers to build a gate and assist with the production of 10 or so support commanders, AND give them all the build drone upgrade, and then set them to assist with the nuke build too, before the first (or maybe second?) nuke was built.
Is this how it's meant to be or is this a bug? It was almost two hours before I launched my strike. I actually minimized the game and did a bunch of other stuff for half an hour or so.|||The mechanics of nukes and nuke defences were changed from supcom to FA to avoid speed building nukes (or smd's). The way it works in FA is that the missle itself has a huge buildtime but the nukesilo has a huge buildpower. It has the effect that assisting to build a missile has next to no effect.
I dont know the campain balance (it differs from skirmish and multi) but a nuke in multiplayer has a buildtime of 5 mins, that is for the actually missle after the silo is completed so i dont know about those 2 hours.|||Campaign balance is not multiplayer balance. Basically in MP/skirmish, nuke silos have massive buildrates so that they can't be effectively assisted (they can, but the improvement will be negligible) while the buildtimes for nukes are huge to compensate. In campaign, nukes have that same massive buildtime, but silos have the old, slow buildrates as in vanilla SupCom. So nukes in the campaign can take hours to build. But in FA one of the goals was to reduce the prominence of nukes, hence their nerf. So don't use nukes that much.|||Nukes are definately still used in FA skirmish and multiplayer, just don't expect to rush the missiles by assisting with engineers.|||Thanks X-cubed, that's an excellent explanation.
I just played FA campaign mission... 3? Huge sea map. I built 6 strategic missile subs off 3 naval factories as my first three ships and set them to autobuild nukes before building the rest of my fleet.
The fleet of 10 battleships and countless support units destroyed everything on the map with shore bombardment before any of those subs had their nukes at 80% completion.
LOL.|||If you want to build nukes in any resonable amount of time you need to build the 4 t3 mass fabricators in a square leaving enough room for the nuke launcher to go in the middle so that your first nuke benefits from the adjacency bonus.
And make sure you have positive mass. Nothing slows down a nuke missiles build time like low mass.
Assist if you want with engineer, but theres really little point.|||Actually assisting is more effective in the campaign since the campaign allows you to have ridiculous amount of T3 engineers, and since the campaign silo has a build rate of 120 while a T3 engineer has a buildrate of 15, assisting with T3 engineers actually gives a significant decrease in time. However, in skirmish balance, T3 engies still have 15 buildrate while silos have 1080 buildrate, making engineer assist all but useless.
But either way, plan your strategies around the fact that nukes can only be used sparingly.