Bentham (MangledPork Gaming) commented on that too in his 0.13 features preview video. It might be worth actually submitting a proper bug report giving hardware specs, size of base, number of trains and fps at a given level of zoom so it can be tracked down. The preview window is probably displaying...

Zarnoo - tick the checkbox then exit the app. Restart and you should have fullscreen.

The strategy was that (pre-0.13) biters would not build a base within a certain number of map chunks of a non-polluting player object. This meant that you could wipe out a base, whack down a box or "victory" wooden pole and they would never come back. You could also spread out a long line ...

Some of the early SimCity games had simple stepped terrain and a simple terraformer raise/lower facility, so it has certainly been done before.

As for Factorio, while belts and power could certainly deal with the steps, how would you expect pollution and ballistics/lasers to be handled?

Thanks for the suggestions. I will have a play around and see what fits.

An odd keyboard, I must admit. I have the Wacom tablet on my left which has a few buttons on it (and of course the scroll ring) but at the moment I am looking at the arrow keys as they are close to R-Ctrl, R-Shift and R-Alt. I have not yet thought much about E, Q and Tab but the Del, End and PgDown ...

As a new Factorio player, I would appreciate some guidance from other Lefties... how have you set up your key mappings?

I have worked out how to get away from WASD for movement but of course there is Tab, E, R and so on to deal with.