So, the next hour has been more interesting, relatively speaking. But not interesting enough.
You will quickly run into a situation where you are short yellow or red and need it to keep building stuff. I can’t really give any sort of “yellow is used more in X buildings” guidance as I haven’t really noticed a pattern. I just know that running out of one or the other immediately shuts down whatever it is you wanted to do. Yes, the existing nodes will regrow but it takes awhile - 25-30m+ it looks like (these are 4 figure nodes, typically 1200- idk maybe 1800 not sure whast all the sizes I have seen; Green has typically been 350-500 in size so far).
So either you wait (booooooooring), try to re-position to make something work, or you can recycle stuff. If you have researched, and built, the recycler. You only get back 50% materials and. . . yeah that’s a lot of work and truthfully I would rather just re-position. Which is kind of a hassle. You can only fly 4 buildings at once, which is relevant when you have a bunch of turrets, 1-2 relays, 1-2purifiers, and possibly support buildings to move. As it so happens I found what I needed - a red, and then later a yellow, even later another red and a green - and was able to sort of shift my efforts in another direction to go get the resources I badly needed. I managed to get a Lair Slayer built and blow up the first lair that was troubling me. Sure enough when you attack it, the lair goes aggro and starts sending alot more creeps at you. I had to cluster a bunch of turrets to deal with it, but was able to do so comfortably. I also build a building to do repairs (it’s a bit funky; it repairs everything in radius but the time to repair is fixed and then split between all buildings you are healing with no way to prioritize short of positioning the building, which has a sizable radius). I ran out of pop growth room but have finally solved that problem and am slowly growing again (well, I will be once I get to that last red node I just freed up by killing Lair #2).
I found some “ruins” I could click on and they gave me a bit of each resource. I built a sort of “early warning” radar building (after researching it; always after researching it excepting a handful of starter buildings) and a later upgrade allowed it to sense resource nodes in it’s radius. That’s a nice improvement over hunting for them manually. I started to get actively annoyed by the lack of main map zoom when I was hunting for resources, actually. but that problem is solved.
So, yeah, the game is sort of progressing as expected but it’s still rather slow and easy. It really needs t way to speed up time. I’m a ways away from being able to properly expand again, which in turn is going to allow me to finish building more pop room (including another round of buildings to upgrade this particular cluster of pop buildings; having to drop this stuff everywhere is mildly annoying) as well as begin preparations for the next round of expansion. Which will include a large flat area to put more permanent structures in.
I wish the waves from lairs were more interesting, or there were other mechanics driving you forward. OTOH, it’s possible to screw yourself and be forced to wait a long time to begin properly growing again (unless you restart). Speeding the game up is only a partial fix for it’s problems. The lairs need to be a little more involved and I wish there was a reward for taking them out beyond “well, expansion is not blocked in that area” or “no more trouble from that area”.