Locomotive and wagons crafting time is too small

[Mion]

Crafting time of locomotive and cargo wagon should be more than 0.5.

Seriously, why crafting locomotive takes the same time as crafting, for example, just gear? And Engine Unit crafting time is 10, so, Engine Unit is more complex than Locomotive?

It needs to be more time to craft Locomotive! If player wants many trains, he must to automatize it. I think value 10...20 would be nice.
For Cargo Wagon and Fluid Wagon values don't need to be so big. For example, 2...4 is enough.

[Koub]

Imho, there is no interest in having a long crafting time for something you will craft so few of, especially when this item is not part of a production chain.

[vanatteveldt]

I think the 'official' reason is that locs (etc) are only crafted on-demand by the player, and a longer time would just be annoying. This contrasts with an engine, which is also used in science packs, so the crafting time impacts factory design.

However, that reasoning is not applied to military stuff, power armor and shields cost quite a lot of time. So I'm not sure what the reasoning is.

Anyway, +1, I agree . I automate train and wagon construction anyway because I never have enough engines with me. I usually have a "deployment track" in my building store next to the engine/wagon plants where I can place a new train and it is automatically fueled so I can send it off. It's a shame there is no way to build a train automatically...

Imho, there is no interest in having a long crafting time for something you will craft so few of, especially when this item is not part of a production chain.

See above, why is there long crafting time for military stuff in that case. My current base, which isn't even close to halfway done, has 50 1-4-1 trains, so 100 locomotives... that's not so few compared to some other items.

Reactors and centrifuges also have a real crafting time, and I would bet that in almost all bases the number of locomotives is higher than the number of nuclear reactors... (in related news, it's a nice challenge to insert the 2000 items required to build a rector into a plant within 4 seconds )

[Mion]

Imho, there is no interest in having a long crafting time for something you will craft so few of, especially when this item is not part of a production chain.

As vanatteveldt wrote, in game there is military stuff, which is even less needed than trains.
Many people play with complex railway systems and use many trains, so often it's not a "something you will craft so few of". Especially with "Rail World" map generator preset.

[Hannu]

Military stuff are needed in huge amounts or are consumables. But typically player needs few tens of locomotives during the game. Just increasing of building time would not change much. Locomotives are practically free so that player could automate production and build 50 locomotives in chest waiting for use without slowing the growth of factory significantly.

I would like to test a version of Factorio in which building of infrastructure would cost significant amount of resources and time. You should calculate what you need to build or expand a production unit and begin to product thing couple of hours before. And it should also take hours before new assembly line would pay itself. But such a game would be very difficult to balance so that there would not be annoying waiting times. And probably it would be too slow and demanding for most people who want fast growth and continuous action or they get bored in 10 seconds.

[5thHorseman]

Imho, there is no interest in having a long crafting time for something you will craft so few of, especially when this item is not part of a production chain.

See above, why is there long crafting time for military stuff in that case.

I see 2 reasons for this. Either or both could be valid but I don't work on the game so can't say for sure which is valid, or if there are any other valid reasons I didn't think of:

1) Military stuff has a longer crafting time because time could be a factor with it. You never need to quickly craft a locomotive engine because you bit off a little more than you could chew when attacking a Biter base.
2) The game is not done yet. Item time balancing sounds to me like one of the last things you'd want to do in the game. So why put any time into balancing it now, when you're going to have to put time into it later no matter what?