Handcrafting and handfeeding are overpowered

[Nick-Nack]

Having played a little bit of Official Factorio Team Challenge and having watched some Factorio speed runs:
Handcrafting and handfeeding coal to furnaces is overpowered. In a game about building factories, doing things manually shouldn't be a winning strategy.

I don't have a really good solution yet. One way would be to limit player inventory, especially by having the same number of slots but lowered stack sizes (for player inventory only). Another option would be to decrease stack sizes specifically in buildings, which would make it very tedious to put a new piece of coal into a smelter every some seconds.

[Hannu]

Your suggestions sound quite annoying for me. For example when I go to make an outpost or rail lines I should always keep a car with me. I prefer current system. At least I try always automatize things I need constantly. I do not care what are best tactics in speed running and I hope that game will not be changed to fit speed running. It is more fun to advance slowly towards massive base. I think that end game begins when I get rockets and it is the most interesting phase.

[Deadly-Bagel]

Yes, the single player is mostly balanced as it is. You don't want to be manually feeding hundreds of furnaces for a 100+ hour game (or even until you get electric furnaces) even with current settings.

Rather, this sounds like a balancing issue with the speed run maps. The obvious solution here is to reduce the size of the coal patch (same amount of coal in a smaller area). It should be possible to position it so you can only get 2 miners on it, or example next to some water. It will then be more difficult to drop 50 coal in all your furnaces because of the slow supply.