After practically developing carpal tunnel from all of the clicking involved with manufacturing Battle Tank (Craft) for sale, I thought "There has to be a better way..."
1. Hideouts
2. Select Manufacturing base
3. Manufacture
4. New production
5. Battle tank
6. Start Production
7. Assign all runts (right click)
8. Aye
9. Aye
10. Yer Bridge
11. 6 (to fastforward by one day)
12. (manufacture complete popup) Allocate Manufacture
13. Aye
14. Hideouts
15. Fence
16. Battle Tank
17. Deal
Repeat above steps until out of Plasta-Steel (I bought in lots of 1000 to make 4 tanks before purchasing again).
Buy plastasteel. Add in previous steps. Repeat.
So I started brainstorming about how to "automate" this process a bit more. I hit upon the idea that we could wrangle a Guild Rep into "running" the business for us, and just put it on auto pilot (make infinite, sell all). Of course this wouldn't be completely painless so I added a 10% "management fee" to the cost of production, but this would be well worth saving the seemingly infinite clicking.
What this mod does:
Presents a new research topic called Defense Contract. This depends on Privatizing World Peace and the interrogation of a Broken Traders Guild Rep. Costs are minor for the topic, and once researched allows for the production of "Defense Contracting" in the "Merchandise" section.
$2,557,500, 100 workshop space, and 10000 hours will produce one "Filled Defense Contract" ( Sales Price - $4,000,000" ). (With my factory base of 410 Runts cranking away, this is showing an upfront profit of $42.5 million/month before salaries and overhead).
This is strictly designed to make the endgame burden a bit easier by minimizing a bit of the grindi-ness.
(https://i.imgur.com/iEmS9tO.png)
Edit: Updated for Piratez .99.e.3 ( to include Armory requirement and also adds in a slight cost for workers to simulate space in the vaults for the Plastasteel).