are you using up your entire iron supply? You arnt making the most of your iron income if you arnt spamming forges and assemblers to turn iron into steel and gears to the point where your extractors are running nonstop.

There is already a rocket truck meta in pvp you should be able to get a very large army of them by 20 minutes.

I think i agree that weirdly enough, the factory element of this game is.... actually too much.
It's supposed to be an RTS, most RTS are fast paced. So of course, having to spend an hour to have as much units as a Planetary anihilation's 1 minute start is rough.

I wonder if it would've been better to tone down the factory side, make everything more expensive, but being able to actually.... do stuff.

This feels like the game is just gonna have tryhards that know exactly what to do and will rush down your factory because of it.
In other RTS ? Base rushes are fine. You just rebuild. Here, it means having to shift your attention to a single area for multiple minutes just to rebuild. It just... feels very slow. Which is against what 99% of RTS decided to do.

The more fabbers the slower stuff can go, think they all try to gather the required resource individually and just end up streaming between warehouses trying to grab it and never quite managing, stopping your factories to stockpile more and using less fabbers gets things built quicker. Building everything at once is also a no go, like other RTS you have to manage your economy with growth in mind, too much can stall you. I rekon we need tr2 extraction, finding resource income not really keeping up with production, still have no real idea what im doing though, propper build ethic is lost to me.