Supposedly they have the same range so that you can't creep either but actually on smaller planets Anchors outrange umbrelas aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand exploit. so please patch this. I've had it happen to me and I've been using it since and whether you be victim or perpetrator, nobody finds this fun.
In order for this to be a problem, you must have already totally lost the orbital game. The fabricators are super-vulnerable to Avengers and you can keep tab of the base up to orbital layer via PiP/pup avengers on auto patrol like air forces. If the enemy can control the entire orbit expect over your basis, he should be able to kill you via Anchor creep. The same way he should be able to kill you via Pelter/Turret/other creep if he out numbers and out resources you that much.
I actually think tatsu's not nuts for once: it's very unintuitive and wacky for this to be true on some planets and not others.
Now you see this is something I actually like- varying terrain (in this case planet size) actually effecting things. It was a hallmark of TA that things could fire further from high ground, and is a result of *simulated projectiles*. It's a nuance that more experienced players will learn, I don't really see this as a 'bug', in fact I'd like for more terrain based variation in the future (e.g. low gravity on small moons could be interesting and so on).
what? you can't predict when it will work and when it won't it's not ALL smaller planets, IT's not even certain sizes, sometimes it's on bigger planets. this doesn't work to your advantage you can't make a reliable use of it. No i'm talking about a scenario where the Anchored can't put orbital factory up because out of room and being anchored at all edges or just no avengers. anycase the engies are there so they are battleing it off anchor-umbrella. the anchors are rediculously op in that senario and it's kind of dumb since if this is an orbital rush, you don't have the time to build up an orbital launcher and make your way back. stop contradicting me for the sake of contradiction. it's an exploit that's directly linked to the way range rings are drawn, a dev (forget wich one, I think it was @varrak came on here earlier to explain bugfixing with these, they aren't completely fixed)
Okay, now we might get somewhere. You are talking about this being used as Orbtail Rush tactic early game. I can see why that is annoying/hard to counter. But consider a few things: The enemy had to rush orbital and built an engineer (expensive). You needed to not at least have built an orbital radar (otherwise you knew what was comming when he left orbit and would have countered then). Then it still takes a lot of time for a lone orbital engi on a T1 economy to build the anchor. Maybe having a proper T2 Obrital Engineer that can build anchors will solve that (a lot more delay to get those) Maybe having a mobile Anti-obrital vehicle would solve that. You are not really important enough for me to argue with for the sake of arguing. So I am not doing that. I am not 100% sure about it in this case. The small planet sizes/strong curvatures are a side effect of the planet being abstracted to something very small. We cannot really make full sized planets in the game, those small ones are just "placeholders" for normally much bigger planets. Could be a feature, could be a bug, could be a unintended feature, could be something not considered.
or could really be a bug and a result of orbital to ground and vice versa ranges not being completely fixed. here I am exploiting the **** out of it: (ignore the bad playstyle and coherent UI glitches)
My speculation on why this happens to be the case: (it's some html+js to show attack ranges of anchor and umbrella (you can fiddle with the numbers))
Not any more. This is some sort of new problem. By design the umbrella is meant to outrange the anchor, because you can't cost-effectively counter anchors with avengers.
I had observed a while ago that I could outrange anchors with well placed umbrellas but just thought it was part of the game.