Their effectiveness doesn't affect how quickly they can be built. A couple of these responses are weird!
It depends if you mean with one engineer or a squad? A single engineer won't build them faster then a factory can build units, but a squad of engineers is as good as a group of factory's. So people tend to assume that turrets are easier to build then units, they are not, but 5 factorys building 5 units at a time looks slower then 5 engineers building one turret at a time.
It pretty much does. As the radar coverage is quite big you have a lot of time to neglect PDs until you see threat. Then build one in 15/30 secs with a fabber. Their cost should be balanced by build time, not so much metal costs. They can still be powerful but you should be punished for not protecting.
A time cost would be acceptable for the double and triple variants. But I still feel we need the single barrel laser to be a cheap temporary anti-raiding defence for expansions, weak but suitable for fast moving, lightly armoured bots and cars.
You could also limit the number of fabbers that contribute to building a turret. If you have enough fabbers, you can pop up turrets like a Farmville crop (a metaphor from 2009! I'm so trendy) regardless of their cost or... ahem... effectiveness. I'm being nitpicky about the use of language. If Tatsujb had written "why are turrets allowed to be built so fast", or "why aren't powerful units built more slowly" or "why are turrets so cheap", I'd agree without argument.
The build time is only depend on the metal flow from the fabber? Maybe should uber implement some kind of metal flow per time ratio to slow down some building construction?
And the metal cost of the unit, which means the only (current) way to make the turret (without affecting other units) take longer to build is to increase it's cost. PA needs a separate buildTime property for units so build time is not tied to the cost.
Eh, the metalcost / buildpower is the time it takes to build, unless your stalling eco. I think the basic defence towers might be too powerfull AND too cheap and if you don't watch out they totally make basic units entirely useless. There is 1 thing tough, you might be able to build them up quickly, but if you want some actual coverage then you need to walk and that costs you your time then. So protecting 1 point really hard is easy, protecting all sides just enough is something else (unless your playing on bullshit terrain maps, basicly every map except moons afaik).
I think once we get more T1 arty options (like the grenadier unit) we'll find that turrets aren't quite as hard to deal with at T1, since there will be a way to deal with walled off turrets at T1.
Unit cost and build time are inexorably linked in PA, which creates its own set of issues. Fortunately, base turrets can be fixed in an alternate way. Make base weapons require energy to fire. That way you can have a low cost, efficient base defense which experiences its full cost when active. Do away with this inflated stat garbage.
The only issue I can see here is how do you find a reasonable balance on the energy cost to fire the turret, make it too expensive and you can't afford to throw one up early in the game to help with raids. Make it too cheap and it won't really matter.
Well. Start by putting some energy storage on the turret (no not with the gun what are you thinking Uber, it is a base structure and base structures should share). Deciding the energy drain is simple. Say you have a turret that is worth 600 metal of "lethality" but only costs 300 metal to build. Make the weapon cost 300 metal worth of energy to fire (this is 400 energy). If the same turret was 150 up front it would take 450 metal to fire (this is 600 energy). EZPZ. In the end both turrets cost roughly the same to work, except one is easier to deploy and thus more useful on defense. It's not as though a base turret is made to be 100% active. They only fire a small fraction of the time, so even a huge demand can be soaked up with a little bit of storage.