I posted this suggestion on steam, someone suggested I posted on the uber forum. My thoughts: Building the Catalists and shooting the Annihilazor would be 2 sapertting things. Energy and metal for Catalist constuction and activity. Shooting the lazer would requir X Million stored energy that would deplete on use, so you can only fire until you have enough energy stored again. That way replenishing is is depend of the amount of energy plants, and you're able to counter it by targeting energy storages. Any other thoughts?
This has been one of a number of suggestions for balancing the laser. A simpler mechanic I think would be just to give it a long charge time.
Actually I really like the idea of it requiring actual energy. I loved in TA how losing a fusion reactor or two would shut down your higher-tier defenses, made attacking the economy buildings even more effective
I thought the Annihilazer wasn't balanced until a played a couple of games with it. It really is balanced already. You can see the 5 catalysts being built from anywhere without vision and you get notifications for it. It's your job once they start getting built to stop it, most common tactic is you send nukes, the slighter better tactic if you have resources and an appropriate asteroid is to halley the death star's controls permanently disabling it, after that do a land invasion using gates on the control module further away from the enemies base.
