Alright, sorry for the long blackout, let's pick this up again.
For now I have updated the OP with the following:
old wrote:Buildings go offline in emergency phase, except for the main terminal and facilities.
Changed to: Turrets get an emergency mode too. Turrets, repair nodes, and booster nodes go offline when in emergency mode.
old wrote:Highway nodes. These simply emit a "highway" effect in a certain radius and you can chain them to build highways on gamma. Uses both bandwidth and energy, like all buildings. Heavily in development, no specifics available yet.
Changed to: Highway nodes. You will be able to place down highway nodes, and 2 of them connected will create a straight higway with a fixed width, and length limited by the connection range of the nodes, so you can create a chain of them. In the interest of simplicity, higway nodes will be energy transmitters too, so they will transmit their own energy that they need to function. Highway nodes will be of course more expensive and have less connection slots than energy transmitters, in order to not take away the role of transmitters themselves.
Newly added:
Every gamma island will have at least 4 external teleports, with the goal to make it harder to "camp" them.
Newly added:
Terraforming will be limited by manually painted no-terraform areas along the coastline of islands, making sure that no teleport can be cut off from the others. (Should we decide to put fixed teleports in the inner parts of an island, then appropriate no-terraform routes will lead to it.)
As it was mentioned above, yes we have built a test base called T1 Test. This is only to test whether a terminal's bandwidth can hold everything we want from an average network, and should not be seen as a base that's well defendable or anything. But we'd like you to see that this is about the amount of buildings that we would like to have for one network, with some playroom left in bandwidth for mining outposts, highways, etc. (It's now 17420 / 22500.) The point is that if you want to have a lot more turrets, or a lot of long highways, you'll probably have to sacrifice some facilities.
I will soon go through the whole topic again and promote more ideas into the OP if they can be done.