OK, I follow the thinking now, thanks for explaining! Pushing the button early on did feel rewarding, I’m not too veteran yet to have completely forgotten heh.
Some sort of unlock sounds reasonable. I don’t like the idea of having to commit (already constrained) plot area to unlock it, but what about making buildings upgradable? You construct some material (PAM: Production Automation Machinery?), and can somehow apply it to a building on a planet, allowing the building to loop a single recipe. The material is consumed, but it persists on the building until demolished. If all buildings in a line have this upgrade, you can also loop the queue (allowing for more complicated ratios of loops).
This would require I imagine some considerable work (no building by building upgrades now, right? plus new UI to manage this upgrading), so two simpler ideas:
- Tie the unlock to some universal progress metric. Once you hit 1,000,000 Total Equity at the end of a Period, for example, all looping is unlocked for the company. While I might plug my thread about why this won’t be an even standard for all players, it’s good enough.
- Could tie it to number of experts obtained. Obviously, more than 2, but 3 or 4 wouldn’t be unreasonable. Could even make it tiered: single building loop at 3, whole production line at 4? Only downside is often its that one or two RIGs I have powering several FRMs that I want to automate, and the experts don’t come fast.