Tons of ICBM: Escalation Blitz mode. It really is fantastic, it's a great nuclear triad RTS. The original game was a step up from DEFCON, basically trying to make DEFCON from more of an art statement chess game to a more traditional RTS. The sequel added ground combat (in a limited fashion) and tried to basically be an everything-nuclear-warfare-and-weapons-of-mass-destruction game. But it's also kind of bloated at the same time and learning how to fight a (dramatized, arcadey, diorama-like) nuclear war requires such a change in mindset that I decided to downgrade back to Blitz (the throwback-to-the-original-ICBM mode) instead and have frankly been having more fun with it.
I like to use the scenario editor to make historical scenarios with lots of interesting real world terrain. Mostly WW1 and Age of Enlightenment empires. There's an option to equalize population, but it's wonky; the population is basically just scaled for each city, so if you have a country that's geographically compact, then of course it would have to also have massive cities, and cities have increasing returns in lethality to population, so by virtue of being a human player I can cheese it. I had an unsatisfying game just now as Napoleonic France where I literally placed second by nuking one city... the Dutch East Indies had 80% of its population in a single city, hit it a few times in a suicide raid and a faction has been wiped out. You're rewarded more for aggression than for saving your people, so you can win if you can basically deal the equivalent of killing 2 to 3x your population. I've only slowly learned that, due to the specifics of scoring, you want to pick fights with everyone, basically just nuke everyone's biggest city at least once and before anybody else does it.
Nuclear triad warfare revolves around air, sea and missiles with a thin layer of space and, in Conquest or Standoff mode, a thin layer of ground (that looks more bloated than it really is). Airbases deliver massive firepower but are sitting ducks, so really the only viable way to actually cause mass killing, but unless you have a plan to use them they'll just die. Missiles are pieces of shit but are the one thing that always gets through (for all practical purposes), so they're counterbattery fire. Submarines are fucking useless. The problem with boomers is that in real life they're a deterrent. I always pictured the point of them being to lurk off coasts, but this is not the case. The truth is much more interesting and uninteresting at the same time. The whole point of these ICBMs is they can hit anywhere already. The boomer's SLBMs are going to be hit from across oceans too. What they DO is they're the one system that can't be easily found out through strat recon - spy planes, satellites, radar - and instead have to be actively hunted by attack submarines, meaning you (either lead people on patrols as America did (horrible idea in game, won't work) or do bastion defense like the Soviets: turtle up the boomers where they can't be reached and defend them with your own defensive cordon.
Problem? The game is based around nuking each other, and there's also no way to "deter" because there's no simulation of revealing your strength to act as a threat (a threat that is, again, empty, because everyone knows everyone's going to fire everything anyways). So any resources spent on a boomer are wasted.
All told, fantastic game, the Blitz mode is excellent by itself and I'm using it to get a much better head for the campaign and the Standoff mode.
I'd been modeling with equations what nuclear strikes should look like, since the game doesn't say anything about how it actually translates strikes into mechanics. In real life, and comparing it against real doctrine, it seems that cities demonstrate increasing returns (lethality) to population density and diminishing returns (lethality) to individual payload size (in terms of holding a strike's tonnage constant), or equivalent, increasing returns to number of payloads per strike. The former is because, of course, warheads kill by a fireball, so more people packed in means the area incinerated killed more, which is why you (in a game purely about killing people and not destroying economic infrastructure or causing societal collapse) you hit the biggest city and basically work down a list (since your strikes are going to mean it stops being the biggest city after enough nuclear holocausts). Bombs are less efficient as they get bigger - some cubic law that the tonnage has to grow disproportionately to keep getting linear increases in fireball radius - so you drop more bombs. I'm not sure if the game has that in it. In real life, you'd also have concerns with area (which grows with diminishing returns with population, there's empirical estimates for it) as smaller cities could be theoretically overkilled or start having inefficiencies with overlapping fireballs, and then the whole economic efficiency angle.
All told, there was a real life shift in nuclear doctrine from massive nukes to many small precise ones, which is why it feels like nukes went backwards over time: the golden age of things like Tsar Bomba (50 megatonnage, Fat Man was like half a megaton) was the 1950s, but before long it started making more sense to saturate areas - not just to get past ABM but also for area coverage - with MIRVs shooting off these pissy little bombs.