NEVER leave your comm unattended

I had no orbital and the SXX was already above me.

If your opponent was able to build a SXX laser and get it on top of your base before you noticed it (which you can do with a single orbital radar at the cost of 300 metal), you made a horrible mistake. Cost-wise, that's the equivalent of your opponent sending in over 50 levellers (significantly less expensive than the SXX) to your base and you not building a single laser turret (which costs slightly less than an umbrella).
The cost of preventing an SXX laser is peanuts compared to the cost of building one. You don't even need orbital units.

This was all after my base was practically wiped out.

Then the SXX was overkill and you were pretty much doomed no matter what they used to kill you. That doesn't make the SXX useful.
My point here is that an SXX laser is never cost effective unless your enemy isn't paying any attention at all. If your economy is even at >10% of your enemy's capacity, you should be able to effectively counter a SXX laser.

I wasn't doomed. I was on the moon. I actually won that match. Kind of...

If you weren't doomed then you must have been paying no attention to what your opponent was building, because the orbital radar costs almost nothing and gives you vision of any SXX lasers they might be building. An SXX laser costs over 14 times as much as an umbrella which can be built by T1 units.
Imagine how useless nukes would be if they costed over 10 times as much as an anti-nuke, and if you could put up anti-nukes even before going T2.

I was about to build the radar and then he rolled in and put anchor and some orbital fighters over me. Then I built an umbrella and chased them off. Then my base died.

Orbital radar doesn't give vision of what orbital fabbers are building, which is a bug.

Was this before or after the SXX? Because you should have been able to have an umbrella up way before your enemy could build an SXX. I don't really see how you could argue against that, because the difference in the costs associated are so extreme.

Huh, didn't know that. At least that makes the SXX slightly less non-viable for sneak attacks, since your opponents wouldn't know you were building it, but it doesn't really excuse the fact that umbrellas are incredibly cheap in comparison. You should always have your base+commander under an umbrella or two, because it costs almost nothing to build anyway.

Launcher>orb fabbers>building>they die>umbrella>killers fly away>base is 93.26% wiped out>SXX

This wasn't my point actually, if you stand still and enemy will scout your position lasers will came right over you and they are already aligned to shoot, if you are moving back and forth, they need relocate to fire, it takes them not much over a second, but with proper defense they don't had time to relocate and shoot before they got shot down.

Other solution is to get into Astreus (air units cannot be touched by orbitals), but it has its own drawbacks as well.

and this is good ... because i personaly honestly dont want orbital bombardment become a standart thing ....

That is true but you have to think about it, the SXX is pretty much a super weapon. As I have said many times before I think we need a cheaper less damaging orbital bombardment unit that will make orbital a more important layer.

To add onto the title: "and run away screaming when you see vanguards coming at your commander" countless times I have killed commanders with vanguards, people just don't realize that the uber cannon takes around 3 shots to kill just one of these brutally efficient mechanisms of war.

It's a really expensive nuke with a really cheap anti-nuke.

I actually would prefer SSX to work like over-sized uber-gun, larger splash damage (comparable with holkins) and energy requirements, so it could be used to attack light units blobs (maybe air in splash radius as well) rather than sniping buildings and commanders, at least it would be more useful to support planetary invasion.

Also (I know, I'm keeping telling this) SSX laser could be bit larger (only visual size), it's most powerful and expensive space unit and it looks pretty small compared to radar satellite and anchors.

Yep pa is great so many ways to wage war.

But the threat to a planetary invasion is most likely a nuke silo.

Update!

modders to the rescue.

Reading this thread gave me an Idea and I requested a mod be made.
The mod is now available and called tracking PIPs

If you click on my signature, you can go download the mod manager, and in the "available mods" tab click on "Tracking PiP" 's install button.

then in game, open a second pip and in that PIP's view hit 'C' to select the commander then ctrl-T to track it.

There you go! you now have a permanent rear-view mirror on your com.

Also if you download Commander HP, not only will you constantly have your com's HP on screen but you'll get audio and visual cues when your com is under attack.

Happy Commanders!

I think a MAJOR price cut on the orbital laser would help interplanetary invasion strategies a lot. And I mean like... 20% of their current cost. In that ballpark. You could even slash their damage by a decent fraction (half, even) in order to balance it - even then they could clear a pretty good beachhead on an entrenched world before avengers and umbrellas had their way. Plenty more useful than they currently are.