But after few games we just seek more. More realistic, complex industry.
Currently, bobs pack offers great realism for the modern PCB and alloy industry. Angle buffs the petrochemical industry (and few others) to a sadistically realistic complexity.
Nevertheless, there in still one major component missing. I am talking about the early stage of technology.
One doesn't just throw some iron ore and wood into an oven shaped pile of stone to get metallic iron! Come on! 1540 °C is ridiculously hot. It took the humankind 2000+ years of copper and bronze smelting to bring the technology to get any (barely usable) iron yield. Even with modern knowledge, iron smelting is extremely hard (look at primitive technology on YT as reference).
The 2nd aspect of early stage of technology is too easy automation. Take the basic inserter as a test case. IRL building a robotic arm that can grab objects would take at least a basic microcontroller, as well as few sensors and electric motors. It would be realistically available after you get electric motor and integrated electronics.
The only reason things stay this way is to keep the game playable. Well, I think we can fix realism while keeping it playable and fun.
Those are the key features:
- new "power grid": food. I suggest treating it the same way the game treats power: village (substation equivalent), farm(solar panel equivalent), and granary (capacitor equivalent) are the 3 components of the food power grid.
- new resource: people. Those squishy meatballs managed to bring us technology once, and they will do it once again. They are slowly generated in the village from excessive food, and are one extra limiting factor to the rate your "factory" can grow.
- 2 levels before full automation: man powered (many people needed to craft, slow, high food consumption) and man controlled (low food consumption, in addition to fuel/ electricity)
- primitive tire structures: man-powered wooden crane ("inserter"), dedicated workshops for metalworking, woodworking, ropes & textile (assembler equivalent), wagons on store roads ("trains")(archery weapons & arrows, towers("torrents") and maybe warriors (fighting bot equivalent). We can consider even human carriers & engineers ("construction bots")
- early tech is focused on yield improvement. Early labor intensive chunks of metal allow making tools for the workshops for major quality and speed improvements. Those in turn allow higher yield smithing. The process gradually improves until you get massive iron & steel
output. - Industrial revolution tech used huge amount of metals to make steam powered devices. Basically similar to vanilla factorio, but with extra steam pipes feeding into the assemblers and inserters. Those allow you mass produce electric motors(not the compact one for drones) and accurate gears to gradually switch to electric power. Men are still needed (only late game tech replaces them with a processing unit), but in much smaller quantities than before. Luckily you can "recycle" old structures to get back the people.
In my opinion early game realism it the biggest unpatched hole from the vanilla simplification.
All this primitive early game will look very different from the factorio industrial theme, but we can keep the essence of gameplay around factory planning.
Implementation: All the elements can rely on existing game code. The food works same as the electric grid, including all its elements. People are just another resource you can slowly craft from food. Wagons works same as trains. Just lots of coding (and graphics) but nothing extremely hard.
What do you think?
Evgeni