so I am now on mission three.
I am actually a bit sad that the coal is not an 'era' but just something to run away from.
it could have been a nice step to update from coal to electric making coal a viable resource for automation but as it is, the fact that the inserter uses coal makes it impossible to automate a factory on coal alone.
if the inserter could be feed by a belt, as a special case, we could actually build proper automated factory without electricity as a part of the game and not just because of the tutorial with the burner inserter/driller being pretty much restricted to the tutorial and useless after that
While you guys were busy with whatever it is you're doing (I didn't read the thread beyond the first and last page, admittedly) I were fooling around with the last map of the demo campaign, achieving this:
I also have a bit of that compound south, with two turrets and a copper smelter, but there're limits as to how much you can put in there with everything visible so there's that. The burner inserter/driller was useful to me for one reason - you know gun turrets? I put down three, using up my entire main base's iron input making bullets to feed these, and the leftover coal to fuel the burners in a makeshift base behind the fortifications... in order to produce more bullets (the turrets kept the creepers away, I used the SMG and more bullets to bash the compound turrets). Didn't live to see what the alien artifacts are, torn between seeing if they're gamebreakers, trinkets or whatever before throwing money at the game or doing that now.