I Recently got this idea while watching a cast by zaphodx. He is right - ion cannons are useless now: they take a long time to build and usually an enemy can just destroy your ion cannon and orbital launcher with an orbital laser specially if they ambush you by going laser first on their orbital (let us not forget that hey can still get ground info via T2 radars and scouting and that basic Orbital radar doesn't cost that much at all). My idea is to have catapults be able to attack orbital units in an area as wide as current ion cannon (or maybe require them to switch to a different mode/ munition to do that) then increase the range of ion cannons 3x-5x and (when possible) give them an ability to fire at nearby celestial bodies. This obviously isn't going to stop the moon from galling on you but it does open better orbital invasion abilities (specially now when you can put a t2 radar + 5 catapults on your moon and it will be fully defended) and add another layer of orbital defense (for an extreme cost and build time). This will also allow your moons that you do not want to waster crashing into other planets to be transfered into orbital bombardment platforms (you put a moon with umbrellas into orbit of a planet and you not only get a staging area for your army, but a jump point for your units via the unit cannon and an orbital bombardment platform). To balance the excessive catapult usage I recommend the same ides SupCom used: tactical missile defense (in all forms: naval - on a destroyer, a turret, a satellite and maybe a tank/bot). This would also nest the catapult in quite nicely with the current stationary artillery scheme (T1 Pelter, outranged by a catapult which is multi purpose, outranged by T2 holkings - this also gives you a reason to keep building catapults once you can afford lots of holkings cannons).
I wouldn't mind if there was a later tier catapult that is much much slower but can shoot at orbital. Not lethal at one shot. The idea of a cannon that takes a few minutes to charge and can fire on things on other planets does seem neat though. The "charge" can be the time it takes to build a nuke, and it can not even do that much damage, but being able to take shots on other planets would be nice.
I suspect that the slot of "planets shooting at other planets" will be taken up by Metal Planet secret weapons and whatever the moon-to-planet unit launchers end up being. That said, doing a drive-by with a laser-shooting battle moon would be amazing.
I like the idea of an advanced anti-orbit missile launcher (would that be a SOM, a Surface to Orbit Missile?). And having a moon outfitted as a forward defense around your planet would be quite cool, too!
I consider the umbrella useless. Maybe it's not complete or balanced and I understand and please correct me if I'm wrong. I have thought of two things. 1- Make it fire a constant beam that hits instantly and gradually does damage. You don't want it to be anti-orbital fighter? Then perhaps make it do little damage to orbital fighters. 2- Have a higher tier of anti-orbital structure that actually can hit a higher percent of shots fired. Missiles? Faster projectile?
It can't be arbitrary thought, one of the big concepts behind TA, SupCom and PA is the idea that you don't need all these arbitrary weapon and armor types to "program" unit interactions. Mike
