Planetary Turtling: The ultimate balance issue.

Before the patch you could break a planet fairly easily with anchors. Now the Umbrella have longer range and more damage you have to seriously build the anchors fast and a lot of them or you won't be able to make a hole fast enough. Or you have to hope they forgot to put a anchor some where and get a teleporter down fast.

Still if you first scout commander location with satellite, and send laser platforms with attack command, umbrellas won't help you They will at best shoot same time as the lasers, but it will be too late. In long dragged games or AI in general, commander is usually not moving much. It can help moving the lasers to short distance some nearby planet.

If you don't know what he has where first send in a radar sat.

Then do one of the following (in order of effectiveness):
1. Run a moon into the planet.
2. Nuke and air then send your orbital units there to setup a beach head, if you know he has anti nukes make more than one and wait until you have enough to send to get through and make an impact.
3. Send a rediculous number of fighters and take out the orbital layer, then send a rediculous number of orbital fabers to make a ton of anchors, then setup a beach head (teleporter)

I usually use number 3 because by the time I realize I need to transport tons of units in the orbital layer, I'm also securing my own orbital layer already anyway. But that's GW with Orbital loadout. In a real game I would also be firing a nuke or two.

Planet breaching has been a known issue since like week 1 of the kickstarter. The official stance is that robot battles are supposed to become irrelevant. Use god weapons.

Granted, it's a really terrible stance. Oh well.

In my opinion orbital is generally too slow, especially if you need to catch up with someone. I've been playing this game for more then 100 hours and I feel that the current state of orbital slows the game down in a bad way. Whereas I could previously take out a bad enemy player in 10 minutes and a good one in half an hour. I now need to at least infest an hour of orbital gameplay in just getting my army to him. Because he either left the starting planet immediately or spawned on an other one. being able to put planets in a lock-down is a huge part of this problem. I know how to beat an orbital lock-down, it just takes so long, and often the amount of units damage performance. I like how orbital adds another layer of gameplay but in a fast paced game like PA I don't want that layer to slow everything down.

I know this, I'm just saying it's an under represented complaint drowned out by people who simply think bombers/nukes/comrushing/tankblobs are OP.