Yes! These are great finds and both need to be addressed, i think . Thanks for posting.
Re: upgrading oranges…
the auto turret / ray gun level reset when dropping a new yellow was intentional, but i don’t like it and play testing at CCS confirmed it sucks. My idea was i wanted to have one color “switch” the orange tile type and one color “upgrade” the tile. Eg yellow switches between ray gun vs. auto turret, red upgrades each type. I thought that resetting the upgrade level would be a cost that makes the decision to switch more impactful (ie: “i already paid a few reds to charge up my turret, i could switch to a ray gun which has unlimited ammo, but do i want to go back down to level 1 ray gun?”). But i think in practice it is frustrating and confusing.
One solution would be: upgrade level never resets, so if you switch between weapon types you always keep the same level. So if i upgrade my turret to level 5, i can switch it to a ray gun and then switch it back to a level 5 turret without resetting to level 1. (Something else that might be a little confusing in the current build is that ray guns don’t do anything better if upgraded, so why waste levels upgrading them? I was thinking they should be upgradeable too in the future (like ability to destroy mountains), and was trying to create a system that allowed that.)
Another solution could be tying the colors directly to a weapon type. Eg: if you add yellow it always swiches it to a turret or upgrades the turret. If you add red, it always switches it to a gun and upgrades the gun. This would be a little more straight forward, but it would not scale up if there were 3, 4, or 5 different types of orange tiles; it would be locked into a 2-upgrade tech tree.
Another background issue is that this is all coming out of me trying to find a solution where you choose your weapon type and upgrade it by dropping tiles in the same primary action as the rest of the game (left click, drag, drop). I think that would be elegant if achievable. If not, the upgrading could be done by some totally different mechanic, like: just right-click to open a menu to change weapon type (rather than dropping a particular type of tile). I could see a system where you drop as many reds and yellows as you want on the tile, it keeps track but doesn’t change type (this tile contains 2 yellow and 3 red), and then you right click to open a menu and select a weapon type based on the cost associated with each weapon (maybe a turret has a base cost of 2 yellow, and consumes reds as ammo).