Slippery slope argument
Obviously both extremes of no automation or full automation are undesireable. The best game is a game with the right amount of automation and people draw the line differently here. So I don't see how people using some automation is a compelling argument that we should have more of it or the other way around.
@Jip said
At the moment fabricators are extremely unfriendly to a casual player - they are very volatile to your economy.
They are not more volatile than any other eco structure, they have constant input and output. What is volatile is your energy consumption/production and you need to adapt to that which is one of the core gameplay loops.
I'd even argue that new players see no purpose for the unit the moment they understand that you can also upgrade extractors.
People realizing that it's better to upgrade mexes than to build mass fabs is already dictated by the efficiency. Even fully managed they will only have a presence in the late game.
The important decision here is if we see the mass fab as a unit that burns your excess energy and automatically detects how much excess there is, thus requiring no micro like the rest of the eco structures, or as unit that works like all other energy consumers and needs the player to make a decision if there isn't enough energy. Obviously you would rather pause your mass fabs over any other energy consuming structure, so there isn't an interesting choice to make here. But this applies to a lot of micro in the game. There is no meaningful choice between having hoplites shooting at max range or having them close so they die*. It's one of the inbuilt drawbacks of the unit that it needs some attention to work properly and we have to decide if the mass fab should be one of these units.
Until now it was, and people resorted to mods because managing your mass fabs is very cumbersome. I think there are two viable alternatives:
- Have the game turn the mass fabs on and off automatically
- Leave the management to the player, but give him the tools to actually do it conveniently
Option 2 could mean to have four hotkeys: activate one mass fab, activate 10 mass fabs and the same for deactivation, without losing your current unit selection. This would make it easy to adjust how much energy your fabs should burn.
- The choice becomes more meaningful when you frame it as "where do I spend my attention". If this is a desireable choice to make as a player is up to debate of course.