Hello,
Glad to hear you're enjoying the game, it's a friendly community if you can find us. Feel free to add me (UltraPope) on steam and I can add you to a group so you can find some more players. My tip would be send everyone you meet a friend request, the only way you can get FFA at the moment is spamming invites to people online/organising your own.
1) They make wind turbines generate more power and solar less for their duration. They used to make farms less efficient, not sure if they still do as I think the tooltip has been changed.
2)It absolutely is but if there are no water tiles left/only low water tiles and they are far away then if you have founded on snow then hazah. I use them rarely but they stop people from monopolising a very important resource in some cases.
3)Errrr Soren? Not sure, it expands as the game goes on and people upgrade their colonies but the exact science of it eludes me.
4)Debt is only a killer over time-you get to D level and you can't use the black market and your interest payments will be huge, you don't fix this and your stock price will fall rapidly as you spiral out of the game. This is a big killer in multiplayer FFA. Debt diving is a valid tactic especially in 1v1 which tend to be shorter and taking on debt shouldn't be avoided. I often put getting power off until my third or fourth level HQ if I think I can make more money from my tiles before i'm forced to put some power down to stop the bleed. One of the most common 1v1 mistakes I see is putting down power at level 1, it's a wasted tile and will just slow your upgrades imo.
5) Stock price is affected by level of debt, level of hq and value of buildings, how much of your stock is unowned/owned by you/owned by others, cash to a smaller extent it feels
6) Distance from your colony, price of fuel and if you have water engine/teleportation. I think steel/carbon for scav is also used in small ammounts to make the trucks but don't quote me
7) They are randomly (or psuedo randomly) determined at the start of the game
Hopefully I've been helpful/not too drastically wrong and this keeps you until a dev gets to this post and corrects everything I just said.