I've never really seen power as a problem; the frightful expense of factories is enough of a deterrent.
Same here. Biolabs and upgraded oil wells are the only significant consumers of power. Oil production has enormous downtime and wells can easily be turned off. You retain storage capacity from depowered wells and that's mostly what you need them for. And biolabs stop being needed in huge quantities after a couple hundred paragon and some metaphysics upgrades . My last run I made it to nuclear fission without a single lab. Not because I was going out of my way to do that, I just didn't need them. Though I suppose you might want to build them anyway if you're converting catnip to wood as your primary source of wood rather than having lumberkitties.
The big disappointment with factories is that their bonus seems to be additive with workshops, not multiplicative. They really should have been multiplicative.
Hmmmm tankers cost 22500 steel per craft (and 250 bloody ships) but that gives you 4 to 5 times 500 oil storage per craft vs 1500 per oil well. Meaning they will become roughly equal in steel cost somewhere around that point.
I've yet to build a tanker. 250 ships and 1250 alloy...I just don't see many scenarios where that's cost effective. Even on my first trip to space with only 95 paragon and no metaphysics, 34 oil wells was enough to build a moonbase. Yes, oil requirements to go up quite a bit from that point, but the late-game space structures don't seem to be particularly valuable and if you really need 50,000 more oil capacity to build one, are you really going to build tankers for that? I'd rather reset and come back with more paragon and not need the tankers.