Some time ago, I thought, that trains are not very good option to transport belts, and the current reason for their usage is to play with the mechanics for the sake of it.
In the last game, I found out that it is not true, and trains are actually very useful even in my speedrun freeplay games.
When you play game with not enough resources that are far away from your base, you need to setup some transport, and you need it to not be too expensive, you are making expansion because you don't have much resources, and it should have reasonable flow of resources.
Using basic belts would limit the flow of items to small rates, so lets compare fast transport belts and rails.
Rail costs approximatelly 6 iron per 2 tiles.
Fast transport belt costs 26 iron per 2 tiles.
I played with two way rails and two way trains (one locomotive on each side and 2 wagons), it was quite easy to setup, I didn't have to make turns, they just went back and forth and stations were little, so it didn't take much time to build these.
Minimalistic train station
The only thing I might want to change about trains would be to extend the transport wagon capacity.
Also the advantage of trains is, that it is fun to look at for me, and the factory is more diverse.
It is tradition for me, to play the game, and then list things that are the most important to make the gameplay better experience.
(I remember very well the moment, when I said that "something like transport belt to ground, is really needed
"So here it is:
Blue prints:
Blue prints have been discussed elsewhere already, but I really feel they should get into the game early.
Repair robots:
It becomes bothersome to repair individual wall pieces, or destroyed parts of the factory after attack, I believe that the secondary tasks of the building robots used for the blue prints should be repairing damaged buildings, they could even reconstruct destroyed buildings.
Teleports
I believe there should be some personal teleport building, that would allow you to get quickly to some parts of the map you already colonised.
I think, that simple system of pairs of buildings connected would do the trick, the player could get overview of the area on the second part of the teleport in the entity info.
It took me too long time to travel between different expansions to check if everything is working.
The building would be usable only for player, it would cost a lot of electricity, and it would cost even more with full inventory.
Balance fixes
Beacons https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 524#p10524
Don't allow attack with turrets somehow, using laser turrets to attack is kind of cheaty way to remove enemy bases.
Not allowing to build turrets nearby enemy structures seems like very simple and effective solution, it could be explained somehow
This would allow us to do some long range rocket turrets for example without braking the game by letting the player to use these as attack structures.
