One of the core joys in factory games is setting everything up to produce large quantities of items as fast as possible and then just watching it... go. Unfortunately, in the current state of the game this challenge is largely self-imposed. Perhaps that will change as the tiers and milestones grow larger, but I want to talk about addressing it more directly.
Right now both milestones and Space Elevator tier unlocks are based on specific quotas. This is nice in allowing me to play at my own pace, and I'm happy to build a slow but sufficient machine and explore the map for a few hours, but I'd like to see more reason to tool my factory to build something impressive.
I'm keeping the title and most of the body here general because the exact form it all takes doesn't matter too much. Still, in the interest of providing some illustration, it could be something like bonus goals in the space elevator: Perhaps unlocking some goodie in degree to which the goal is exceeded, or getting a bonus for as long as the requirement is meet, as a reward for feeding several hundred --- or several thousand --- quickwire per minute to the space elevator for an hour or two (The important bit being that it pushes you to produce more than any one caterium mine can support, and/or use alternate recipes: To be both ambitious and efficient) then later using those same production lines to tie into another goal for producing supercomputers by the dozen.
Or it could just be as simple as feeding items to a machine to rack up what are essentially points of score.
Like I said: Ultimately, the form it takes is superficial. But at the core here I want more reasons to build. More goals to feel challenged by and to be delighted in finally accomplishing. I want to see a production rate and work out what kind of supply line I'll need to meet it. To have a boss battle against a spreadsheet, as it were. And once I've made a production line to slay that metaphorical boss, I want to sit back, and watch my factory work for a bit. Satisfied.
