Once you play Factorio enough times you find that there are some general rules of thumb you can follow, in terms of resource consumption at various stages. Once

Once you play Factorio enough times you find that there are some general rules of thumb you can follow, in terms of resource consumption at various stages. Once you know those, it's partly just a matter of figuring out your scale milestones. I do three stages, a main bus starter base which is enough to fill out the tech tree and launch a rocket, and then once I've automated most things, then comes the first megabase, which after enough time I rip up and build the modularized, distributed megabase (mostly solving the problem of keeping train traffic spread out and avoiding long multilane belt busses). The interesting thing is that building a megabase isn't necessarily just 10x-ing your start base, it's actually doing things differently because how you move resources around starts to become a problem in ways you didn't encounter at the smaller scales.