The game's sense of progression for Marathon is pretty much non-existent. your first goal was 65 plastic bricks I think, the second one is 45 bb guns. You'd think the next goal would be plastic dolls, as that's the next product in the line that you can make.
It's not.
Instead, you need to now focus on getting 10,000 research points, which is fairly expensive to do. The Kitchen Set is the only thing with more than 100 research points to start the game. Everything else is either a flat 2 or goes up to 59 I think. The Kitchen Set is also the most valuable to sell, and also rather expensive to make. If for whatever reason, you go for the 2 values, it'll take you 5,000 of them to reach the points needed. At $100 a process, that's around $500,000 of the money. The water gun had the next highest value after the Kitchen Set, and would have been the 59. That will take it roughly 170 processes, which is still $17,000.
Now if we include the cost of setting up the chain to process such a thing using the water gun, that's one research center ($5,000), one assembler (also $5,000 I think), two smelters ($4,000 total), two processors ($2,000), two importers ($6,000), and I think 7 inserters total ($7,000) that adds up to a whole lot of money. Don't forget to add $200 for every conveyor you might need. Two at minimum because importers won't place their product without one.
All that adds up to $29,400 at least just to start accumulating points. Even if you do this set-up twice (which requires either off-setting the research facility with explicit timing, or two of them) you still will need to pay roughly 170 processes worth, and have doubled your total cost to make it happen faster do nearly $60,000.
That's the total cost of unlocking two areas after your first one, and boy will you need space after doing even one of those as a set-up, never mind two.
Keep in mind that whatever you set to research will not earn you money. So it will always be importing, processing, smelting, assembling and researching - every single action costing you money. Sure, you can unlock loans first, but that just winds up delaying what you are trying to achieve (and pretty massively. 3,000 points for just the ability to have a loan.)
Maybe later in the game is more fun for this, and such a thing is most likely less of a problem. But starting with that makes the progression feel like it's not there, and is a hell of a cost drain when you don't have high earning potential.
