Most probably when we can shift a planet into the orbit of another planet, (not kinetic bombardment). then we would have a use for its interplanetary attacking capabilities. In example, i would turtle up a planet and fly it through space, i would then pull aside another planet (into its orbit), and then fire units at the other planet like a pirate ship would attack another ship with cannonballs I'm hoping this will allow players to Plunder a planet instead of just smashing it to pieces
But they've also said time and time again, they can't give exact dates for anything because their development process is an iterative one. Even they don't know when it's going to be ready, so they can't give you an exact date. All I can offer you is my personal best guess, which is 'some time before December starts'.
I hope Umbrellas can shoot at incoming units. I'd like there to be some defense against T2 bots crashing down next to my commander or other vital spots.
You'd think air defence would turn them into pulp as well. They'd have to pass through the air layer anyway, right?
That's cool thinking. Maybe umbrellas could knock a percentage of incoming bots out to thin out numbers. In example, 1 umberlla can destroy 3 out of 5 incoming units launched by the unit cannon. so if someone built 3 unit cannons and launched 3 groups of 5 units, 3 umbrella's would destroy 9 out of the 15 incoming units, and 5 umbrella's would repel the attack completely (i only suggest it like this to make turtling a whole planet harder or more expensive than building lots of attacking units)
Alternatively (or maybe in addition) it might also be good if unit launchers were woefully inaccurate. Like yeah, the units will reach the target planet, but you can't really specify where. Or you can but it's within a large area of uncertainty -- like catapult attack radius uncertainty. So for like a small moon (asteroid) you're basically just throwing units onto it not knowing where they'll land, but that may be the only option to try and stop someone from building Halley engines.
The shells like in the trailer would make them way more cost effective to protect them from the atmosphere and attacking ground or orbital units.
Can't you at least come up with something PA themed? ;p Yup, this is the most likely scenario to be honest. The way Uber has talked about Unit cannons leaves me to believe that they won't be something you use from a regular planet's surface to shoot things into space/other planets so you need either a moon or an asteroid you've placed in orbit of a planet to use them, technically we're halfway there already(you can put things in orbit around other planets in the system editor) but I imagine that with the way Orbital is right now they're prolly working on a major overhaul(hopefully) like what they're doing with the UI so we'll prolly see a big slew of changes all at once. And in the Words of Neutrino Himself from the May 3rd Live Stream; (11:58) When is Feature X going to be ready? Mike