'No Sell'? But I get the picture. I'm not sure what the 'certain way' in question was - TARDIS Wiki talks about some sort of pulse device, I guess it's that?

But no, I have no problem with 'they can upgrade to account for everything you do'. Not 'become immune to', naturally - but if you're rolling boulders down on them, they should be able to upgrade thick body armour, possibly tripod-style supports. Phobos' idea of total physical restructuring is the key to that version - and given that we have the cybermites and detatchable hands, it's absolutely not out of the question.

But a change introduces new weaknesses. So now they're immune to boulders - but to get the mass, they've had to merge several Cybermen into a single unit, and they're also ridiculously heavy. Got a gravity globe you can shoot, like in Flesh and Stone? That's an escape route for you, since there's no way a Cybertank can make the 'jump and catch the reverse gravity'. Or, with a little technobabble, maybe you focus the reversal on the single-unit tank, which can't hold on against the pull - so then they separate, and you go back to the boulders.

The problem with the nuclear strike, to my mind, isn't that it was dark (er, 'grimderp', apparently?); Doctor Who has never shied away from megadeaths for any stretch. No, the problem is that it wasn't clever. It's like Macgyver's gun; we signed up to watch the Doctor come up with a clever plan to fix things, not to watch him resort to brute force.

As I've said elsewhen: both RTD and Moffat have a tendency to have someone else provide the solution at the end of the episode (whether it's a true deus ex machina depends on the story). The difference is that RTD drove the Doctor into situations he couldn't fix; Moffat sets him problems he can't fix without dying, or without massively compromising his principles (The Beast Below). And the nice - and slightly scary - thing about Eleven is that he almost always chose to save the world (or whatever) anyway.

(Random Example, for if my explanation broke down somewhere in there: The Parting of the Ways sits the Doctor in front of a Dalek invasion of Earth. He is unable to do anything except send Rose home; she then shows up out of nowhere and saves him. Nightmare in Silver sits the Doctor between the Cybermen and the universe, and gives him a nuclear bomb - which he is willing to use, despite the fact that he's sitting pretty at Ground Zero. I'm not saying the difference is universal, but it's a definite theme)

hS

... for a story that does pretty much exactly that, but with Daleks. We've seen enough Dalek variants over the years (Special Weapons being the one that springs to mind) that it could work. I'd set it in the Dalek Dark Archive - the place they keep all the prototypes they aren't yet desperate enough to use. ;) So the characters (it's actually the Alchemist and one of his companions) could face the flying Dalek Swarm - a collection of centrally controlled Dalek Drones - a spike-covered Dalek Maiden (as in Iron) - a radioactive and incandescent Dalek Furnace... all manner of things. All in a dark and maze-like factory.

Uh, back to Cybermen. Since their very first appearance, they've been claiming to be super-smart and emotionless. Except... they never are. All their plans consist of '(sneak around and then) frontal attack'. It's not like the Daleks, who occasionally actually have brilliant plans (even if the Doctor then beats them); I can't come up with a single well-thought-out Cyberman scheme. Even their sneaky plans (The Next Doctor are just schemes to get big enough weapons to hit everything until it breaks.

hS