Furnace Speed Research

[Monotof]

TL;DR

Research to speed up Furnaces, similar to mining productivity.

What ?

Integrate Research to speed up Furnaces, to balance mining productivity.
Similar to mining productivity, it could be an infinite research.
In the Research tree it would be locked behind advanced material processing wich gives electric furnaces.
Similar to mining productivity a 2% speed increase per tier could work.
Similar to mining productivity it would just give a permanent 2% speed, energy consumption and pollution increase.

Why ?

Furnaces should be able to scale with your Game Progression and currently Steel/Electric Furnaces really don't cut it.
I have a medium size Factory currently on mining productivity 62, so my miners produce 2,34 times as much as "normal" miners.
That means I can have more production with fewer miners, but the Smelting Arrays become insanely big. Just to have a modest 600 Iron/s you need massive Furnace Columns wich look out of proportion to the tiny mining fields. Especially since Electric Furnaces are used even more since Energy has become essentially free with nuclear, making the smelting 1,8x bigger.
I would love to have my well proportioned Factory back where Furnace Arrays were big, but not ludicrous.
It would also allow for easier upgrading of existing Factories, where you can upgrade the Mining, Belts and Factories with modules, but have to squeeze in more Smelting since you can't get faster than Steel/Electric Furnaces.

I think it would make Factorio a better Game because all of Factorio is about Balance, and having minuscule Mining feeding MASSIVE Smelting definitively doesn't feel balanced.

[Engimage]

I would probably opt for Electric Furnace MK2 instead which would be able to hold 4 modules and would have a speed of say 4 instead of current 2.

[deer_buster]

The ability to add more dynamic technology effects would allow for mods to include such research. Just saying.

[Avezo]

I like the general idea, but I think it would be better to be implemented through infinitely upgradeable modules. Same for mines instead of current implementation IMO.

[British_Petroleum]

firstly, electric furnaces + speed modules use less space than steel furnaces, probably even better with beacons.

Secondly, the game has this amazing thing called blueprints. allowing you to double your smelting setup in a few clicks, if you need more smelting

Thirdly, a lot of players like to have the perfect ratios of production buildings; meaning they like to be producing the same amount of iron that they're using. If your furnaces suddenly start smelting faster then it'll throw off this balance and you'll need to redesign the factory.

And lastly, if you want faster furnaces, you should try bob's mods there are multiple tiers of electric furnaces, each more difficult to manufacture than the last, and higher tier modules too. You can shrink your smelting setup down to a tiny fraction of the size

[AileTheAlien]

Integrate Research to speed up Furnaces, to balance mining productivity.
Similar to mining productivity

Am I the only person who thinks that the productivity research is out of place in the game? It seems to not fit with the speed/efficiency/productivity modules in the game. Adding furnace speed research would be similarly contrary to the module system in the game.

[JohnyDL]

Am I the only person who thinks that the productivity research is out of place in the game? It seems to not fit with the speed/efficiency/productivity modules in the game. Adding furnace speed research would be similarly contrary to the module system in the game.

Not really the idea that as you progress and get more tech you're able to get more resources out of a mine than before is true in real life, there are old abandoned metal mines throughout the world that were later revisited with better tech cause while it wasn't possible for bronze age people to get metal from the stones later people, like people in the medieval period, then again during the industrial revolution could, seems like a pretty natural progression to me, we know there's metal in X now and we're far better at turning X into metal now but we're still having trouble identifying X in the world or even in given mines, we can follow seams but don't necessarily find all of them that could be the initial count. And there's the argument that there might be small chunks we can mine and miss/ignore because they're small but as we realise that our needs are so large we grab everything even the smallest spec.