Gameplay Suggestion: Ship Building From Earth Surface

[anonusername]

I would definitely agree with this - facilities ought to be 'bombardable' from Orbit, absolutely they should.
We can use Councillors to sabotage projects, so why can the technically superior (at the start, anyway) Aliens not be capable of Orbital Bombardment of large, obviously hostile constructions and facilities under construction?

Strictly speaking, your Councillors can only sabotage completed defenses for the same reason the aliens can only bombard the completed version. Research projects use a completely different mechanism than infrastructure.

Hmmm.
Not convinced by that - there is a mission 'Sabotage Project', which takes away from engineering projects underway by a rival faction.
So not just a completed facility - that comes under the mission 'Sabotage xyz' IIRC.
Or am I missing something?

Unless I am misunderstanding, engineering projects are just non-global research. I know I have used "Sabotage Project" for that with no option given to target facilities. Maybe there is a third type of sabotage mission in addition to "Sabotage Project" and "Sabotage Facility", but I have not found. (I don't count Assault Alien Asset, since that is basically just "Sabotage Facility" vs. aliens.)

[neilwilkes]

So building things such as Orbital Defenses cannot actually get sabotaged then?
Sheesh - I have not got that far as yet (builds keep dropping that do serious harm to each attempt so far have forced restarts on several occasions - but at least I am now left with a far better understanding of what I need to get done in the first 10 game years) but if this is true then there ought to be a (very high risk) way to sabotage this.