> When you start a new game in Factorio, if you never played it, you can’t know how much of each resource you’ll have to extract and neither how much of an item you’ll need to produce.

Some of this information should be recoverable somewhere in the tech tree tooltips, if nowhere else.

More importantly, vanilla Factorio plays a nasty little trick on first-time players: The final sciences and launching the rocket both require scaling up. This means that either you refactor your factory, or you grind out that first launch super slowly using an inadequate production line.

Veteran players know ways to design some modularity into a factory, and when to yank out subsystems and rebuild them bigger somewhere else.

Factorio: Space Age is actually more forgiving about scalability. You don't need to scale up as much, and you have much more powerful tools for doing it. Instead, Space Age has lots of novel game mechanics to master, and higher total system complexity across the solar system.