Currently, the factories are revamped to be much less of a headache, to be actually highly productive, and to be profitable in the extreme with wholesaling. however, i did genuinely enjoy the puzzle of making a factory that was able to produce 6 pizzas a minute in the older game. something about the complexity made it feel rewarding, even if it required millions of dollars and hundreds of factory workers to turn a profit.
I just feel that currently, the mechanics of the factories is ludicrously simple. I like how fast they are, factories usually are incredibly efficient at making the kind of goods we sell in the game. However, I would like more complexity in how we run the production lines. perhaps making them really long factory lines but extremely quick production, especially for low cost items like soda or bags, utilizing several employees to tend to one line. make them large but able to be creatively constructed, like how before there was the possibility of bottlenecks and differing production times across machines in the same production line resulting in people who can actually plan a factory layout well being rewarded by better efficiency or utilization.
I like how much the factories have come, but i did like how i was able to do more than just follow a blueprint of a couple machines to make a single factory line that never hiccupped and just produces day in and day out. perhaps machines could even suffer malfunctions, requiring a repairman employee to maintain the machines. maybe a office job of a plant manager who would allow you to see detailed manufacturing information and to set production quotas, and have the factory have a more variable throughput than just a constant, steady and unending stream of products. It’s really nice to have a profitable factory, but when i can make limited edition books for next to nothing and sell thousands per day and earn more than a million dollars from wholesaling, it earns more than my citywide chain of grocery stores that i have a separate factory for that produces all of its goods in self contained little lines, which in total makes closer to 50k per day. A really large, long line of variable efficiency with more machines and stuff would be really cool, managing bottlenecks and malfunctions would be really neat, and keeping the profit the same but the work required to make that happen more challenging and requiring actual planning would be awesome.
Conversely, factories now are just a couple of machines slapped together in a very limited configuration and don’t actually require any management of space and movement, so i can pretty much cram as many machines into a space while not worrying how my workers are gonna get home. I just think it could benefit from more complexity with the same level of reward, that’s all. I’m sure the current state is only temporary, i just wanted to give what little suggestions I have. thank you!