Orbital invasions.

Yeh, because it will be clunky FOREVER. /sarcasm

peace, man. honestly I really don't see how balance would negate the clunkyness. there's admittedly some missing gimmicks.

agreed, I'm expecting Uber to improve orbital UI somewhat

Orbital is broken for a very simple reason - it totally shifts the gameplay. Once orbital begins it is like you are playing an entirely new (and far crappier) game. Troops are out, factories are out, all that matters is spamming eco, orbital units, nukes, and anti-nukes. Teleporters currently serve almost no purpose - if you can get one down then it means the planet was hardly controlled whatsoever. For orbital to work there needs to be a continuous transition from single planet to multi-planet warfare.

Simply put, multi-planet warfare shouldn't be a fundamentally different type of gameplay - but rather just an expansion of existing gameplay into multiple simultaneous fronts. From the very moment you finish wiping the enemy off your planet you need to be able to begin directing your forces onto other planets to hinder expansion and establish beach heads. Multiple fronts should always be opening and ongoing. The only way to do this is to have some way of easily sending units direct to a planet. Until the transition from one planet combat to multiplanet combat is as seamless as opening multiple fronts on one planet, orbital will continue to be a slow, resource hogging, 1+ hour turtle fest. It's really as simple as that.

Uber has made it pretty clear nothing like this will be in by release however. At this point i'd be willing to try a mod that allows all units to enter the orbital layer and transition between planets for a price, or a building, or something. The results honestly couldn't be any worse than it is now. Their robots, they should all have little jump jet thingys in their boots ready to lift off. Or create a special orbital tier of factories with units that can all jumpjet between planets. We need tanks, bots, and air that can immediately take the fight to the enemy for orbital to be worth it. Lasers, nukes, and teleporters should be supplementary to the core gameplay, not supplanting it with a more boring gameplay as it is now.

I like planetary annihilation, seems like people forget the name of the game

The more I play the game the more I want the simplified Orbital like we saw in the Kickstarter Trailer. Enough to make it fun, but simple enough to not take a bunch of time to manage it.