[wongarsu]

Personally I think most of the game is actually about managing changing requirements and layouting, but there's certainly a subset of gamers that are after the perfect endgame base (the X science per second crowd). If that's the target group of the compiler then you can assume that enemies don't exist (they waste CPU power), resources are decoupled from the factory using trains (they run out too fast for tight integration) and that the entire tech tree is explored (everything before that is just a unimportant bootstrap base). Making those assumptions certainly makes the compiler more tractable, but it also gives you another interesting metric to optimize (CPU load of running the produced layout)

[munchbunny]

If you can make some assumptions like train length and loading/unloading station design, you can probably guess how many trains you need to supply a given design, which means you can probably automate the placement of resource collection outposts.

You'd need some empirical data on train acceleration and top speed, but once you have that plus some generous assumptions about latency tolerances, you can probably automatically lay out tracks and train routes and resource outposts.

[sitkack]

Laying out the perfect Factorio game would be akin to laying out a high performance super scalar out of order cpu. CPUs are math factories.

[TheMerovingian]

There was a poster a while ago that designed a series of mods that would automate the sprawl of his base. It would detect ore patches and set up mining and train loading.

https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=41377

[mvolfik]

Did we just automate automation

[bregma]

Welcome to Factorio, the game where the goal is to automate your automation of automation.

[philwelch]

I’m a beginning megabaser myself. For how engrossing Factorio is, the vanilla gameplay to the end of the tech tree is just not enough ;)

At some point, the inserter-to-belt interface becomes a serious bottleneck. CPU load does too. As for enemies, you can basically treat them as a solved or solvable problem after artillery even if you don’t turn them off.