You're missing the power and fuel in your calculations. But i agree that the estimate i made is probably to high.

My example completely discounted placement time. What i was trying to illustrate is that you can't place items faster than you can produce them. And item production rather than placement speed is the limiting factor for most of the run.

In factorio it is all about expansion rate. Apm is not the deciding factor thou still important early game. As factorio is a game about automation everything can be used to increase your effective "apm". As soon as you start automating things you free up time to do other things.

There is a maximum theoretical expansion rate in factorio. It is approximately x2 every 5-6min. If you dedicate your entire factory to expanding the factory. Example. One belt of plates is 900/min. Making a factory to mine, smelt and make useful items out of that costs around 5k plates. So it can produce enough materials to double itself in 5-6 min. This is of course only materials, acctualy placing the new factory can also be limiting. This gives a interesting equation to try to maximize.

1. For how long should you keep expanding the factory factory and when should you focus on the goal instead?
2. How fast can you acctualy expand the factory even if you have all materials?

The first one depends on the end goal. Launching a rocket needs about 300k plates in tech and another 100k for the rocket. So how long should you spend doubling your expansion rate before switching to progressing towards rocket?

This is all made more complex by that you need to progress down the tech tree to be able to automate more efficiently and faster. Stuff like bots, modules etc require a small investment in tech but can greatly affect your expansion rate afterwards. So this need to be added into the equation.

Edit: My reasoning is colored by doing runs to rocket, in shorter runs you can expand faster by not automating, as you do early game in all runs. This is another thing to add to the equation. At what point is it more beneficial to automate things fully instead of handfeeding etc. Short term burners are quicker to expand but long term you loose time if you need to manually maintain your builds.

Oh, I like the discussion. And it is quite clear that I did not invent most of the current meta. some things sure. but far from most of it.

I agree that Factorio is a wondaful, complex and non linear game. And that it is quite clear that we will never find the most optimal path.

I'll do a reply in the forum thread on were I think you logic fails.

The comunity desides the categories, currently about 100 runners that get to vote, only prerequisite is to have finished and submitted a single run. Don't listen to much to players like @blazespinnaker that claim it is very easy to beat every record but still have not even managed to complete a single run. We get those from time to time, and so far they have all given up before even submitting a single run.