Well it’s a factory, for starters. the graphic is different from the towns. The icon on the map has 3 huge smoke stacks sticking up, to help set it off. One nice feature in the game is that when it comes time to upgrade a turret to the next tier, it will show the part you need. There’s a little “eye” icon and if you click it, it will go to the map and show you which factory has that part.
I don’t mind needing to buy the parts for etherium (in fact, that’s a good mechanic to gate it). Waiting for delivery seems. . . pointless? Same for the missions you send your dudes and dudettes on. It feels like a leftover mechanic from when a different design was intended on the game. Sure, you can just go do any old random mission and by the time you are done everything will have arrived. But it’s weird.
Unfortunately, I think colorblindness might be killing you here. Different sections of the map will get zoned off with a darker reddish/brownish border. The zones will have dark stripes of the same color running through them, alternating with the map background. And there will be a little graphic with a countdown timer indicating when the cultits will take the region over.
FWIW there are per-turret parts but they self-filter so you don’t need to worry about using something on the wrong turret or anything. Also, I think the per-turret ones are purple. They just give you the greatest increase is all.
The cost to spend people on missions increases based on something but I’m not sure what. Overall town upgrade level maybe?
The gating in how you unlock upgrades is a bit too arbitrary for my tastes.
Agreed. Another mechanic that feels like it was from an earlier, different design for the game. One where more stuff was time-bound, and where clicking to collect stuff was probably more pervasive (a la a lot of mobile games).