Defensive structures

From IceWars Documentation

There are 4 different structures for defensive purpose (speaking about defending against "normal" attacks. There is a number of additional buildings, that help you to reduce the damage, bombers will cause. However, these are not covered here!):

Planetary defense station
Orbital defense station
Lunar defense station
orbital base defense control (only availible on battle stations)

For the very beginning, only the planetary defense station is of interest. For each one you build, you'll get 10 free defense slots, on which you can build planetary defense (same for the orbital defense station, that will strengthen your defense later in the game). What type of defense you build, is up to you. In the beginning of a round, it will most likely be some sort of missiles (eighter SDIs or SDI nuclears).

As those missiles are only capable of defending you against small fleets of low-tech ships, don't forget to replace your defense while researching more advanced technology. For example the mentioned missiles may do a good job as long as attackers uses fllets of lionhearts and slayers.
For defending against hitman, you'll need some additional gauss cannon satellites, and when the first big daddies start to bulldoze the neighbourhood, you should really think about researching the SDI plasmalasers.

In general, you can say the planetary defense is good against the bigger ships, whereas the orbital defense will take care of fighters and bombers.
The only way to find out what defense suites your personal needs is to use the simulator:
Insert some different attacking fleets you expect your opponents to use and try to find a defense, that does at least as much damage to this fleet as resources are lying around on your planet.
Another aproach is to simply have more defense as the guys in your neighbourhood. An attacker will generally go to where he can get the most resources, protected by the weakest defense.

[to be continued...]