The "Metal/Fuel to Power" thing gives you (if my memory serves) 500 power each, but you can only ever have 2 total.
They give a % boost to power production, so a higher-power planet gets more benefit and a lower-power planet gets less.
That said, I don't think those things are the way of the future because reversible resource-conversion tends to be a fiddly mechanic (AIWC certainly showed that). So perhaps the science-for-power trade is a better thing to offer. My concern there is that you can already dump science into increasing your static defenses by upgrading turret types, so it feels a bit redundant.
If you get unlucky (lets say that the planet that makes the best choke point only has 1000 power naturally, or is generally resource poor) then you can wind up kinda screwed just through the map layout.
It is very intentional that different planets are easier or harder to defend than others (both in wormhole count and power output).
This means that "picking a chokepoint" is more complex than it was in AIWC. It's not just the map-graph, it's also the planet's power output, wormhole layout, etc.
That said, the actual numbers are probably too harsh right now.
As a side note, on "generally resource poor": each planet is really good at one resource, semi-good at a second resource, and normal at the third and fourth (hacking is handled differently). So no planet is just terrible, and no planet is great at them all.
I don't really know how to best defend a planet with (say) 3 wormholes to AI space and one wormhole back to human space.
A few ideas:
1) Kill the warp gates on 2 of those 3 neighbors, so waves only come from one wormhole.
2) Focus on defending the
other side of the wormhole-back-to-human-space (so you'll have one main kill-zone instead of 3). That does assume that your "outer" planet is going to get smashed, but we do want defense-in-depth to be a thing here. In this case just having a chokepoint and a pre-chokepoint.
If you build your defenses around the wormhole to your space then your turrets get ripped to shreds by long range attacking units.
I think I left too many of the turrets with the Structure defense type, whereas more should have Armor, but we'll see. Or are you seeing Armor-based turrets get shredded in this way too?
Turrets are too short-range to lend supporting fire between wormholes for the most part.
That will depend somewhat on the planet's wormhole configuration, but I get what you're saying.
It may be that the "wormholes too spread out" case is a place where we'll need that unlockable one-per-planet shield generator so that your turrets don't die to sniper-range and long-range fire before they can respond. But we'd also need to make sure that case wasn't too common, as otherwise it changes from "unlockable" to "mandatory", which would be no good.
