I'm really waiting for an update where train stations will have queue's. This prevents 10+ trains racing en masse to that one single active/open station. It was in the works, hope it's in 1.1
I've kind of lost interest after building out all the non-infinite sciences. Scaling for the sake of scaling just doesn't appeal to me a lot.
(To be clear to people who haven't played it: Finishing out all the sciences is something that cannot happen until after launching a rocket which is the nominal 'win the game' condition. I thought factorio was tremendous fun, and it ate up all my free time for a week until I got a rocket launched.)
A lot of what I found interesting was these emergent challenges like train throughput being poor because of chests becoming unequally full and blocking the train with slow unloading... which can be resolved by using the logic control. I really liked setting up advanced oil processing to not block on overproduction. Stuff like that.
In some sense I think the logistic bots kind of break the game-- they eliminate most logistic challenges, but on the other hand they're also the only way to both reasonable scale up capacity and also to handle minutia and worry about larger scale things.
I guess I would have liked to see a parallel track of other technology which is harder to use that you could work on exploiting for those of us who don't find merely scaling up for the scale of scaling up that interesting.
E.g. I think it would be neat if there were advanced chemical processes that required writing PID controllers to effectively drive, or resources scattered on the landscape that you needed to program autonomous tanks to go gather. Different enemies that require different strategies to defend against, etc.
Maybe some of this stuff exists in mods, I haven't really looked at those.
The infinite scaling doesn't matter. It's about building out the factory itself, if that doesn't motivate you, it's just not for you.
Regarding PID controllers, I've done that for real-life applications (hobby) so no desire to do that in a game.
Oh, I liked building a factory, in order to unlock then figure out the new mechanisms or defend against the bugs.
If I didn't I wouldn't have played through completing all the science.
But for me the game ended at that point because after that it was just more of the same with little more to discover.
I can see how some people enjoy cranking it to 11, but that part isn't for me.
Maybe I'm missing some of the challenge, but I feel like I could mostly scale to arbitrary size (I think my game currently keeps one rocket port with prod modules saturated) now by simply copy/pasting factory chunks and letting the bots replicate them. I guess I would find automatically furnishing long range construction with construction supplies kinda interesting to do... but I dunno why I'd want to try. :)
also personally, I find rocket launches to be too abstract to care about as a goal. I get where you're coming from with the infinite science, but I find it a lot more satisfying when every new tier tangibly improves the efficiency of my factory.
There is no vertical upgrade path beyond the rocket. And that is too bad.
This is really unfortunate. "Fortunately" it seems to be a result of the simulation engine using only a single core- there is the opportunity for the developers to get a 2-8x speedup from switching to a multithreaded simulation engine.
I imagine there's fairly loose coupling between, for instance, fluid calculations, biter pathing, and on-belt entities, which tend to require dedicated strategies for mitigating their outsized performance impacts. (to include using console commands to simply delete the biters) Those sound like fairly low hanging fruit for splitting off into three threads if there's no plan to completely multi-threadify the sim engine.
If you want to know more, they were very open about the development process so they will have a blogpost about this.
Factorio is already written in a deterministic way.
The developers main argument is that they cannot get much speedup from concurrency because their software is primarily memory bandwidth bottlenecked and at least on consumer hardware using more cores doesn't substantially gain you access to more memory bandwidth.
You aren't serious about factorio until you are measuring your case for a threadripper mobo.
But in that case you can do even better than building your own. The OEM-only WX line has 8-channel memory, and the cheapest one is a reasonable 12 cores.
This game only starts when you launch your first rocket.
Building huge Megabases is where the real fun lies for me, and that's probably true for most players.
Trying for a target such as consumption of 10K science packs per minute, sustained. The size of that kind of factory is beyond anything, but it is awesome.
Unfortunately, I'm discovering that my DDR3 era PC can't cope with such large bases, I need faster gear...