Satisfactory

tons of other games have automation where you need to recruit towns people and assign them tasks

schedule 1, medieval dynasty and sale blazers immediately come to mind.

My uneducated guess is that they never review whether a design decision has been properly or badly implemented. The only things they managed to make work is space flight and the seamless transition from space to planet - but so did Evochron Legends many years prior.

ONI also took me a long time to get into. Personally I find it difficult, especially late game heat mangement so I usually just end up picking an icy planet.

Maybe that helps you too?

ONI is a game of unforeseen consequences.

It’s a disaster management game pretending to be a colony sim.

You set up systems kinda as placeholder, but they seem to be working fine so you move on to other things.

Then something happens, maybe a pipe backs up. Maybe you mine out the wrong tile. Maybe you set the wrong permissions on a exo-suit checkpoint.

Eventually (regularly) one small problem cascades into several massive ones.

A few examples:

Example 1: I was electrolysing oxygen and hydrogen from water. I was using the hydrogen for power, which was fine. But I stopped mining out the organic biome, which starved my other means of producing bulk oxygen. My base is quickly becoming oxygen starved, my Dupes are losing sleep due to low oxygen, so their performance and productivity is down while their stress is up. So I re-route half my exo-suit oxygen supply to go into my base core. This buys me time.

However, now my suits are starved of oxygen, but I need them to keep expanding and get more bulk oxygen material. So it’s a catch-22; slowly suffocate in my base core, or gamble and try find something to get my oxygen generation back working. (Fixed by setting 80% of my suits to not receive any oxygen, so at least a few would be usable. Went and found some Algae to get my bulk O2 back on line. While that was ongoing: Built a new electrolyser setup. Pumped oxygen from the edges of my base directly to the bedrooms)

Example 2: in a hot biome, looking at cracking into a sealed Volcano for free steam power. I fuck up, 300 degree steam everywhere, machines break and shut down the entire area. Scramble to rebuild machines out of a more heat-tolerant material and get them back online. Crude oil touches off a hot tile, instant 500 degree Sour Gas cloud which further cooks the area. Brick it back up, decide to retry that one later, once things settle down some.

Part of the fun is also when you struggle to get a system working, then you can figure out automations for the system to free up Dupe time. It took a while, but now I have a blueprint for a 8-capacity ranch for little critters that eat rocks and poop coal. I’ve automated feeding and collecting the coal, and sending it to my coal generators. It also collects eggs and holds a restocking cache of them for when one dies of old age. The rest get digivolved into meat for the barbecue. All my dupes need to do is pet the live critters, very occasionally bring a fresh one from the cache to a pen and cook the meat that is conveniently placed in the fridge beside the grill.

It's most similar to factorio imo, but has a bit more depth to it (though both have depth in different areas). There's a bit more emphasis on the 3rd dimension in the gameplay than factorio, and less than satisfactory. I think it threads the needle between the 2: more orderly than satisfactory, more chaotic than factorio.

One you convert a star system into a Dyson sphere, you gotta get FTL, there's MOAR STARS to sphere up.

My favorite thing to do was to make Faberge egg style spheres around my systems.

Also: mecha.

Of note: I played this some time ago, and there wasn't an adversary system in it yet. I see they have added one so, cool, but I don't have any opinions to add about it's quality and effects on gameplay. It was fun enough for me on "passive robot star farmer" mode, and remains one of the few games where I took a screenshot of how cool I thought something looked.

Tbh I couldn't play NMS for the amount of walking and just looking for things everywhere constently over and over again for stuff.

Exploration is fun and enjoyable but not when I have to spend hours trying to find one fucking thing to make something. But that's just a me thing.

I can't stand NMSs inventory system and crafting. it's just horrible. I dislike everything about it from the icons, to the inventory ui to well..everything really. it's just draining even thinking about it.