/let's out deep breathe of relief.

Finally some movement on this discussion. Perhaps the artists can render some drawings and the mathematicians can hammer out details. I'm only selling the concept.

(Also fore sale: shield walls and mining colixum without towers anymore.

I think they used that image to show how they were going to restrict wall building on beta islands, right?

i wrote that under the link, yes.

I cannot remember what the minimum size for a gamma base was, with just a terminal, 2 reactor, the 4 essential production buildings and their booster + minimum energy grid towers - as close to together as possible, it was around 500m diameter for the buildings only (t1 all of them).

thats  where you can start drawing your circles - if you want, you can do it yourself. Zoom has posted pictures of all gamma islands, you also know that 1 pixel =10x10m square...

at best, you start with an island that is not mostly flat and filling the aviliable space as good as possible (that X shaped one for example.

Looking forward to your specific changes for testing. Any feedback on the Painted Zone idea, at least for testing, or is that out?

@DEV Zoom

thats a cute little example T1 base you have there on PTS. 
It has everything you need for production in it, and a total of 12 turrets for defense.

Now the question: how much NIC/Materials and time does it need to build that base, and how much effort does take to level it down or cripple it into oblivion?
And where are the mining towers to fuel those exposed reactors, and the walls to prevent npcs from just walking through it or range-fit heavy mechs from sniping the energy nodes?

Alright, sorry for the long blackout, let's pick this up again.

For now I have updated the OP with the following:

Changed to: Turrets get an emergency mode too. Turrets, repair nodes, and booster nodes go offline when in emergency mode.

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.

nice change on the highway - makes more sense that way.
please use THE SAME system when you revamp the Alpha highways (aka less manual highway painting without visible structure, or structures that you manually have to adjust to the terrain )

about the teleports - will they also have multiple connections?

That's basically open to discussion, we could have islands that do, and islands that don't.

We still have at least some hope of doing beacon terraforming right, but chances are that we might end up with module terraforming only, and improve that one with additional features, like height display for tiles (which would help in making the more geometrical terrain structures like ramps, or simply in making sure that an area is completely flat or not).

This is awesome news! Keep us updateand give us an idea within a few weeks of gamma release. With a rough timeline of expansions it always creates content in game and plenty of meta gaming. All in all this looks like excellent balancing and content

I know this is off topic but I wish you hadn't gotten rid of NPC explosion damage allowing loot drop, I heard wonderful things about beacon pits.

Ville, Zoom is saying they are still working with beacon terraforming. But if that can't get that to work they will revert the changes to be used with the terraforming module. SO it sounds like they have not changed the single title module yet.

That is what I get when I read it.

Ville: we didn't touch single tile terraforming yet except for the slope limit. I'm saying that if we don't manage to make beacon terraforming useful enough then we'll remove it from the game and improve single tile terraforming instead.