Captain of Industry

Gaaaah! Another addictive game in the vein of Factorio and Dyson Sphere. Concise description: Contemporary Industrial Automation. Large tech tree. I'm "only" 60 hours in and haven't finished a whole game yet, so I will probably comment further later. This isn't science fiction with magic robots and drones (yet) or production and supply chain you can't relate to; this is how it's done in real life (with some simplification). You think you can just suck oil out of the ground and be on you way? Boy, you gots to distill and crack them hydrocarbons dontcha know. Don't tell your kids, but it will probably make them learn stuff. I learned a lot about the petrochemical industry, metal production from iron, steel and copper. And farming too. Even made me research them out of curiosity. I'm a retired engineer, so it got my Geek going on. This is what powers civilization. It's still under development but very playable now, I havent hit any game destroying bugs. Bend nature to your will, but don't piss away resources. This will keep you playing late into the night.

Pay attention when you play this game in the evening and the next day you have to go to work, because it's highly addictive and you couldn't realise that it's already the next day morning

This is a really addictive game. Basically, it's a factory building simulator. Your ship of survivors comes ashore on an island with a few trucks, some supplies and excavator and has to rebuild. Yeah, there's not much story. That's ok, you're not here for a story (or if you are, you got lost, go play a Trails game for a great story.)
So it starts off as basic survival, building a few things just so your people don't starve (hope they like eating potatoes. Lots and lots of potatoes) and it progresses until you're running multiple nuclear reactors you built. It's a long journey, and one play through can take 50+ hours easily (you could rush it in half that time if you really wanted to).
There's a lot of replayability with new maps, and realizing new ways of doing things. A lot of it comes down to efficiency, how do you make your island work better. Working better often means less use of trucks. How can you place your factories better, use conveyor belts to move supplies, do all that.
At current the game's early access, so features are still being added (trains will come next some time early next year) and there will be more updates after that. The dev team is actively working on the game, and they've done a really good job making it bug free. Now, while it is early access and they are adding features, there's absolutely a fully playable game here. If the devs wanted to, they could call it complete here and it's work just fine (though I'm glad they're adding more and are responsive to player feedback.)
This is a really fun, addictive game that I've played through several times now. It can be pretty relaxing once you get the basics down. There's a lot going on, but once you learn the ropes it's a really great game.

I am very reluctant to recommend this game. I say this because it is addictive, more so than any game I have ever played in a very long time. I have been playing video games for a very long time and nothing has quite captured the realities of the modern world more than this. I am an engineer by trade and have also had my experience working maintenance in an industrial setting. The child in me that loves all of the machinery, conveyors and automation that I see as a profession becomes alive with this game. Being able to design and build around what you've already constructed becomes a constant challenge with an ever demanding city that you try to keep happy. The mechanics are surprisingly well refined, few bugs exist and I would have expected this game to have been created by a major company, not such a small team. Though some graphics are a bit simplistic outside of the core game, such as the missions with the ship, it reminds me of older games that I loved when I was younger so it doesn't really take away from anything.

Written before update 3 which will bring trains to the game, nevertheless this is a very playable game already at this stage of Early Access. Like Factorio before it, it was very playable throught its EA period but Factorio is now a complete game with a DLC on the horizon so why buy this?

Obviously the graphics are much better as a quick look at the screenshots will reveal. It's not comparable to Rimworld and Stranded: Alien Dawn as Rimworld has far more depth and story-telling than S:AD but S:AD is far better looking. This already has much of what makes Factorio fun for me and even improves on the experience.

You are not a character in this game. It's more like ANNO in that respect. You lay out all the buildings, belts, mining zones and dumping zones but you are not present on the map. You can guide things along the way to a certain extent but that's as far as your involvement. But don't let that ANNO reference trick you into thinkjing it's LIKE ANNO. It's not.

You have a population to look after, feed and house. This population prodices an abstract product called UNITY which you can use in various ways: to trade for products from other villages, speed up production or even insta-deliver existing materials to a construction. Think of Unity as the good will of the people who will go the extra mile to complete this particular project. Proving their needs generates Unity and things like pollution degrade it.

Farming is a little more like the farming you find in Farthest Frontier but not as deep. You unlock tech which allows you to rotate crops and laternate them or allow them to stay fallow to help improve the soil's fertility. Later, farming and food production becomes much more involved. I've just reached the bread-making part of the tech tree but it gets more involved than that later.

You can dig down deeper to mine resources from under the ground building ramps for your excavators and trucks or even go up the side of a hill or ridge to reach previously inaccessible terrain. The mining aspect of the game far exceeds what is found in Factorio.

There are no enemies to fend off or to ruin your production but beware - there is a thing called maintenance which is perhaps far more consequential. It's not hard to keep it up but you'll almost certainly neglect it in your first few runs and run into terrible problems. On lower difficulty, you can use Unity to fix some of the breakages but not on the highest difficulty which is where more Youtubers show the game off.
I could go on but I have only seen about 1/4 of the tech tree so far in my time in the game. You will restart your colony 2-3 times before you really get a feel for how to lay out efficient production chains and no doubt, later tech will improve these initial designs further.

If you like these kinds of games, it's incredibly addictive trying to optimise your production chains. This hits the spot for me far more than the competition.

A quick word about Youtube videos: the streamers I've watched play the game on the highest difficulty and the fastest game speed and as a result make the game look frantic and wild. They frequently miss alerts and are in a great rush to expand, expand, expand without getting the infrastructure in place to support it. This is massively misleading as it is quite chill to play on normal speed and difficulty.

Factorio but with a bit of settlement management. Production lines are very complex with waste products that you need to manage.
Very cool mining system with machines actually digging down holes that you need to oriantate with ramps and stuff.

Definitely recommend to automation enjoyers.

This is not a fire-and-forget type of game. The number of items that a player has to keep on their radar at any given time is arguably the most I have ever experienced.

Some of the highlights:
-the intricacy of mining ops and terraforming
-the depth and well thought out research tree
-some research is gated by exploration where certain things need to be explored by ship prior to being learned, thereby incentivising exploration
-the ability to pause and resume on a whim with a single keystroke
-planning mode, letting a player lay out a ghost construct, build, and connect attachments to see feasibility prior to implementing in "real time"
-the tailoring of starting difficulty
-the ability to demolish structures and get back a portion of the materials

Some of the lowlights:
-co-op/multiplayer would be a giant game changer, especially when there is so much to manage
-none of the official islands are huge in size. With upcoming trains, I would hope that CoI introduces several larger maps thereby making trains more functional/practical and less like a novelty.
-ship warfare is a touch crude

All around, a player gets out of the game what they put into the game. A player can dive into the weeds on specific builds, layouts, or activities and still feel fulfilled without having to rush through. Highly recommend!