Automount CIFS / SMB that gracefully handles a non responding server

There are lots of pages that show how to configure the system to automatically mount a network share accessed by CIFS (fstab, autofs, systemd.mount, probably even more). But they fail (at least my trials with the first two) when the server is not responding. With the update to Kubuntu 17.10 it even makes my system hang on boot with a black screen and syslog filled with:

CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -113

And some:

CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -111

So what is the recommended way to handle such a set up?

• Mount a CIFS share at a given mount point (a KDE smb:// isn't enough)
• Do everything automatically for every user
• Take care that no problems occur when the target isn't available
• When the target becomes available just mount it

Background: the target is my NAS that goes to sleep and wakes up on network traffic. So at least for the first requests it won't be available.
And when the notebook would be booted in a foreign network the NAS wouldn't even be available at all (or I start a VPN connection)