Yeah, potentially. I've found the automated trains to be particularly effective at illustrating deadlocks and resource contention. Your early factory will (by the early mid-game) have no doubt taught you all about technical debt. :)

> I'm wondering if playing a game like this can help train a habit of automation.

Sure, why not?

The way you grow a habit of automation is to determine if you're spending "too much" time on a task, and if it would probably be worth the effort required to automate that task.

However, in Factorio you have no choice but to automate if you want to reach the main scenario's end goal in any reasonable amount of time. In real life, it's often not so obvious that this is the case.

Strong suggestion: Don't play in Peaceful Mode. Getting your projects interrupted by P0 drop-everything issues (and figuring out how to effectively deflect those issues) makes life so much more interesting.

What I also need to work on are the intermediate steps where I do things myself, but have a process written where someone else could do it.

I'll try the demo.