Whole-heartedly agree about the curator pick for factory games. Dyson Sphere Program is sooo good. Still technically in early access but I've put probably a hundred hours into it. I started playing it when the English translations were terrible, so some things were a bit tough to figure out, but that stuff seems better now. The way you level up your abilities and automation capabilities is great. I remember exploring my first nearby planet and being afraid I wouldn't be able to get back, and now I'm regularly blasting off to planets 40 light years away and setting up logistics. They've added a bunch of stuff since then and they are adding combat around Christmas time. I'm tempted to start fresh when they add that. Can't wait to see what the 1.0 product ends up as, it seems finished as it is.

I haven't tried many of the other factory games because they are first person. This one feels more like a Sim City or Age of Empires, but you are controlling a mech in third person and there are ways to zoom out to see the whole planet or the whole system, star cluster.