It's worth keeping your pollution cloud clear of nests, since aggression is mostly a function of nests absorbing pollution. If there are no nests inside your cloud, you won't be attacked; if there's a nest absorbing pollution, you will be attacked eventually (with the danger scaling to much ...

how much more am I realistically going to have to scale?

It depends.

If you're comfortable with research slowing down substantially as you add purple and yellow science, then you don't have to expand production of your existing intermediates at all. You'll add new ones, but the upper bound on ...

While at a technology conference last week, someone explained flow batteries to me. My mind immediately went off to think of ways to use them in Factorio, if only they existed. So why not make them exist?

I wrote them up in a Gist at https://gist.github.com/ojacobson ...