Factorio Forums

Radars currently only serve a passive purpose on continuously updating/revealing the generated map.
I also think that exploring and looking for ore fields becomes a menial task really fast especially in the late game so I propose this:

Players should have the ability to "target" radars at a specific area, perhaps via a button in the map view that allows them to draw a rectangle over the target. That area will then get generated if it doesn't exists and will get slowly revealed by the passive effect of the radars.
Perhaps the number of active radars should affect how big of an area the player can generate over a specific period.

Enabling this allows cheating (especially in multiplayer) and other not so useful game-mechanics.
You need to "conquer" about the area, before you can have a look at it. Or just generate a detailed map about it.

Another idea would be something (a special radar, satellite-radar, etc...), that reveals only the resource-fields, but nothing else. Just a mark on the map, for example "Iron: 44,243,958,158".