Excluding Factorio because it has so much dominance in this genre. It’s great but I’d also like to hear about other automation games!
I’m a big fan of Satisfactory, but there are others I’ve been trying too.
Techtonica is an interesting premise, sort of “Satisfactory In A Cave”, and research produces a bulky waste product that you have to store somewhere, but digging out a large enough cave to get any kind of decent factory built takes forever. It’s still early access so stuff may change.
Dyson sphere program. You just need a little bit of space to be able to retroactively add belts into existing stuff because of the 3d belt placement and logistic drones are cheap, so you can ship loads of stuff with them. It lends itself wonderfully to spaghetti factories, which is my favorite kind of factory.
It’s also absolutely beautiful. You can just stop and watch the glowy cubes flow at night or witness an incredible sunrise over the factory. And that gets better as you progress because, well, you’re building a dyson sphere.
I played a lot of Satisfactory, it’s awesome, especially in multiplayer. I also dabbled a bit into Dyson Sphere Program, also quite fun, cause of the different perspective and the whole planetary aspect. Haven’t played it for a while though, no idea about the current state of the game.
Still a great game, both gameplay as well as technically speaking. Every time I fire up my old save game I’m amazed again how well it runs on my machine even with tons of things going on.
OpenTTD if you like building insane train networks and.