I have yet to actually beat the game, but this playthrough I decided on going with a central logistics hub and modular factories. All goods flow into and out of the hub. Blueprints for rail bridges have been essential, but modularizing the factories has really helped cut down on the complexity. Most primary manufacturing is done on site at the point of resources, and further manufacturing is being done near the hub. If I can take advantage of a resource while making higher tier goods, I will. I also have made sure to integrate a hypertube network into the rail bridges, which has really helped with getting around. I'll sometimes add "booster" sections in the runs to speed things up.
p)
Hell yeah, trains were so much fun to play with. I had a big spreadsheet detailing all of my trains and stations, showing exactly what was going on everywhere. By the end of the game I had a few dozen trains and stations.
I haven't played this game since I beat it and got all of the achievements back in November, but for the last few days at work I've been rolling designs for a big train-based megafactory around in my head. Picture a tower made of factories taking up about half of the desert. I've been pacing around trying to describe it succinctly for about 20 minutes but keep giving up and deleting everything I write. I think I've worked out a tileable design that will work, it's just a matter of sketching it all up, deciding what will be made where and getting started. I haven't even launched the game lately because it's too daunting.
If it helps, this latest update has made it easier to scale up production, now that blueprints can auto-connect belts.
Oh god, that changes so much.
I've built a caterium computer factory with 200+ machines total and I used 4 different blueprints for it. It was still a lot of work because each blueprint had like 3 connection points that needed to be connected manually. Very tedious, will not try again.