Production time costs

[hipscumbag]

Just finished my first game of freeplay, and the following thought occurred to me.

In Factorio, there seem to be two types of craftables. The first kind are items which are easy to provide materials for but time-consuming to create, such as circuits, gear wheels, ammo, and science packs. These are needed in plentiful supply, so the player tends to mass-produce these in automators. The second kind is those items which are expensive to build but quick to make, like weapons, train cars, or the automobile. The player only needs a handful of these, and they're expensive to make, so the player doesn't automate these -- gathering the materials is hard enough, and so the item should build quickly to encourage making just the few you need by hand.

If these categories are accurate, there are some items that don't seem to fit their category. They are:
1) Solar panel. The player will build hundreds of these, but they're so quick that they hardly require automation. They should maybe take longer to encourage automation.
2) Pumpjack. The player will only build maybe a dozen of these, and the raw materials are kinda expensive. They should build much faster, since the player isn't going to make a factory which makes whole stacks of these. Making the player wait to build them by hand is a little annoying. You might consider making refineries / chem plants faster for the same reason.

Those are really the only ones that stand out to me, honestly.

[BurnHard]

As I see things, those 0.5 sec craftingtimes of complex buldings like solar panels, accus, assemblers etc are just not yet balanced and are artifacts of the early game development, hence it's an alpha.