[rustyminnow]

I think a lot of the appeal comes from reducing complexity, not adding it.

My first playthrough was a rube-goldberg spaghetti mess. Scaling out specific resources near the end became a very painful process.

I'm in my second playthrough, and the goal is to build a factory WITHOUT all the complexity. How can I cleanly scale out resource production without things becoming a hot mess? How can I build flexible re-usable subsystems that don't restrict systems downstream?

Solving simple problems with complex solutions is one thing (over-engineering) but solving a complex problem with an elegant solution is much harder. And factorio is full of complex problems.