Thoughts on the tech tree

[Plop and run]

So what does the research do for the game mechanics?

1. It unlocks stuff. Most items are not available for you until *something* happens. In case of Factorio, something is the research. But look at things like Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress. There is no research in these games, yet until the endgame there is always something that limits your possibilities: it can be either required items you have to craft first, or items you have to find first, or you just need to spend some time creating a production chain for the item, which means a certain amount of resources or population. In Factorio, the clear example is chemistry. You cannot process liquids unless you already have refineries and chemistry labs.

2. It upgrades stuff. Well, that's just not too exciting. You mean, I have to WAIT for my bots getting better? I would have a much better experience if instead I have to make a more complex production chains for greater effect. We already have this for penetrating bullets, destruction bots, fast conveyor belts and more bots (instead of more bot carrying capacity). Also, we don't have it in Factorio, but imagine that you could increase bots' carrying capacity by adding optional steps to their production chain, like adding additional arm, inner storage chest and what not. Most of the upgrades will not even require a sprite or icon change for the robot and could be applied multiple time for increasing cost.

3. It takes resources, and it's the biggest sink. I would say, by the end game, majority of your resources go for science, a bit less goes for military, and the rest is for infrastructure. If there were no tech, something would have to consume all that ore you are digging like a mad man, that's the whole point. The obvious candidate is military. For the early game, you produce bullets for towers. Later you produce combat capsules. If you could make a line that produces a bot, automatically spawns it and the bot goes straight on biters for either defense or attack to get killed, you would produce a lot more bots than you do now. Combined with expensive quality upgrades from entry 2, it easily can overshoot research in terms of resources.

4. It challenges the player to create an efficient and expandable production chain that can handle TONS of raw resources, and deals with advanced resources like gears, batteries and circuits, not much in a way of byproducts, but we have a little bit with chemistry for blue packs. Again, advanced processing from entry 2 can combined with the need to produce enough bots to deal with biters can derive these properties.

5. Provides a delay. Now this is almost non-existent: I always find myself researching faster than I take advantage of that research.

6. It hides yet unavailable items from the list so you are not lost there. Well, I have nothing on it except for maybe different crafting list representation.

TL;DR
I'm not saying the researching should be removed, but it's mechanics can be integrated into more exciting game-play elements. and then it can be removed

[ssilk]

Moved from general

And there are already a lot of different suggestions into that direction.

[Plop and run]

well it the thing is not new thats one thing, but there are not many suggestions in the post, are there

[ssilk]

it's mechanics can be integrated into more exciting game-play elements

Is for me a suggestion.

Some examples, of what I've found:

https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... ?f=6&t=956
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... ?f=6&t=721
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... ?f=6&t=594
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=5100
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=4677
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=3742

[Xecutor]

In minecraft you basically grind to progress. You need to do A LOT of manual work or A LOT of exploration to find required resources.
In df your progress is limited by many many factors. Including the fact, that you need to dig a lot to find required ores.
And you need to spend a lot of dwarf/hours just to maintain life of your dwarves.

If you unlock all technologies in factorio from the start, you can simply skip many tech levels and rush for the most advanced buildings,
since you don't need intermediate resources of middle tiers in masses. You can build one building of some type, manually feed it
with ingredients and produce just enough to build next tier building.
Factorio is about mass production. It's not about slow and painful production.
You can think that research labs are using this resource flow for some kind of automated prototyping

[Plop and run]

Current limiting factors in Factorio I can think of:

1. Tech tree, includes some of the below
2. Total resources you spent on researching
3. Resources per minute that you can mine, excluding resources spent on researching
4. Resources per minute that your transportation infrastructure can handle
5. Transportation infrastructure itself
6. Military power relative to biters (alien artifacts)
7. Crafted items so far
8. Approved manufacture so far
9. Available power
10. Available space (relevant for death worlds, acquired with military)
11. Time (mining, researching, manufacturing).

As you can see, you need a certain background besides research (including time) to be able to produce something.
My point is that time required to mine + time to create certain production chains along with transportation + time to craft needed items is greater than time required to research. Moreover, if this is not true, you will find yourself doing nothing just waiting for the research to finish. For certain you do find yourself waiting, and that's not a good gameplay design.