Factorio Forums

Placed buildings have a timer countdown while they are "under construction".

You have to craft them in your inventory first. You could always blueprint it and automate the construction with robots, but the point right now is to craft before placing.

This sort of request reminds me of Westwood Studio's RST games, such as the Command and Conquer series.

Way back with Dune, you always had to construct the structure before placing it, and it would instantly build when placed, okay there was a slight delay in the command and conquer series, at least from Tiberium sun onwards, caused by the building animation, but it was only a second or two. this was in contrast to games like age of empires where you put down a "Build this here" marker, then they brought materials to it and built it from scratch.

It wasn't until Red Alert 3 until they actually made a game where, what happened depended on who was building it. There were 3 factions, one of them used the pre-build instant place method, another used a "build it here" marker, with slow build in the world. And the 3rd did a bit of both.
Though, I never played Generals, you probably had some of the build it in the world element here.


Either way... I'm not sure I'd want this in Factorio. it would also be a large rework of the game code, so it's probably too far in the development to change this.