New deathstar cannon firerate

Just noticed that you can fire Nukes to other planets now, not just to moons.
Because of that the Laser is balanced in my opinion.
Its still a very expensive weapon that is announced to all players, and if one player can rush that thing, while other players cant even invade the metal planet, he has won with or without the laser.

As long as you wont set the metal planet as starting points, its the ultimate game ender.
There are enough ways to counter it. Let it be a Moon-Smash, Nuke-Volley or an army of Laser Satelites.

I just played a match, me + normal ai vs two friends.
I rushed straight the the metal planet and build my base there after i killed my first enemy who was on the same planet as my commander. They did not even care about it, and that was a mistake.
Soon after my landing i established enough anti-orbital weapons and antinukes to defend my base, still, the lone survivor managed to destroy my catalysts over and over again, nukes, laser satelites etc...after a while i had all the catalysts ready and annihilated him.
His mistake? he fired his nukes one at a time, has not used his moon to smash me...nothing like that.

Offtopic: Has anyone noticed how much the pathing on metal planets has improved? I was testing RCBM vs the AI and forced a chokepoint to one of those holes. The units would easily go up and down those ramps (even in masses), turrets would shoot down into the trech and turrets which were placed on the lower level shot up at the incoming units on the ramps. It was awesome.

Nukes going anywhere has been on for months. XD

That's pretty awesome. I loved placing turrets on top of plateaus on the old desert planets, made air fabbers more appealing to use

I know - but nukes can be defended against up to a point where they won't really crack the planet either. Of course thats super late game, but the situation is definitely possible.

and i have not played since then

i dont know if uber has changed the anti-nuke system, but the last time my friend build his huge defense wall with multiple antinukes, i figured out, that they can target only a specific number if the nukes target the same point.
So i just outnumbered his antinukes and won

nuke range unlimited.
anti-nuke range very limited.
that's all

They need to add a risk/reward scenario...

I like the idea of it taking energy to fire up the Annihilaser. This would force the player to shut off all factories and radar, etc to build up enough energy reserve to power the Annihilaser. Would also give further reason to utilise energy storage. This sort of things adds in a risk/reward factor. I also think the commander should have to enter into a command module to activate the final fire sequence. Again this would give a risk/reward factor because if people know the commander is needed to fire up the Annihilaser then this increases the risk of a Commander snipe because people would know the commander has to be somewhere around that area.

The Annihilaser is awesome, there just needs to be more ways to counter it. I think it just highlights how difficult invading another planet can be. If you have two players with massive armies on each planet, there needs to be a better way for the armies to clash. At the moment it's too hard to make a beach head.

It would seem the Annihilaser is too cheap and too hard to counter. I think my ideas above are good, but the energy/mex cost of the Annihilaser isn't enough to make any counters viable (i.e. Halleys vs Annihilaser cost). It needs to be cheaper to send a planet smash at the Annihilaser and there also needs to be some sort anti-planetsmash counter (like in the kickstarter video). Therefore risk/reward decision, do I put all my build power into the Annihilaser, or do I spend some on defences to a planet smash. There's so many possible options which would make this more exciting and nail biting.