Orbitals/Global Abilities have the potential to add a lot of flavor, variety, and strategy to the game. I'd like you to consider the possibility of making a deck-building-like mechanic for the game, with each "card" being a different orbital. The only RTS game I've played with this mechanism was Age of Empires 3, so if you are familiar with that game, you know what I'm talking about. Prior to the game you build a deck out of the available orbitals, and only those orbitals are available to you during the game. Obviously Ashes isn't a card game. The decks aren't make or break, they just lead the player toward particular strategies. The player still has to execute well.

Deck-building offers the possibility of tailoring the orbitals to your play-style. While all players could have access to a set of "standard" orbitals, your deck could include ones that help with a rush or boom strategy, provide temporary buffs to the resource/Turinim stream or to a selection of units, call in orbital offensive and defensive capabilities, and counter particular strategies which cause you trouble. The limit is imagination.

"So why not make all the orbitals available to everyone all the time?" you might ask. One, you can create a kind of progression mechanism where you earn XP which you can use to unlock new orbitals of the course of many games. Progression is fun, right? Second, you don't overwhelm new players with a huge array of orbitals. They would initially only have access to the standard ones, and unlock the others as they gained experience. Third, you could make new orbitals a key part of DLC and expansions, though of course balanced so people don't consider them pay-to-win. Without deck-building and limited deck size, it would be difficult to fit new orbitals into the UI. Four, adding limited decks creates a kind of "meta", where deck-building and counter-deck-building strategies are key to mastering the game. Five, you can give the AI different personalities by giving it access to different decks. The AI can evolve over the course of the game's lifetime by making use of decks built by humans.