Games developed by Paradox have been like this for decades and it's fine. The player base is aware of it and buys the game with the expectation that it will take an additional 2 years and several dlcs for the game to be actually good. Everyone knew Victoria 3 won't be good on release.

And crucially, the developers of Paradox are also aware of that and delivery a product that is still somewhat enjoyable on release. They know where to cut corners that will be fixed with dlcs and what needs to be focused on for release.

But when Paradox is just the publisher things don't work out that well. Because the developers might not actually plan their game around that kind of thing. And when they are then forced to release early, their game is still a huge mess.

A thousand times, yes. I love Factorio and want to get my partner into it, but she finds the logistics tedious and doesn’t like the gritty art style. We love Cities Skylines (the original, I haven’t tried this new one yet). There aren’t enough city builders (or games focused on building and without much combat) that have good multiplayer.

Does anyone have any recommendations for that? We loved Stardew Valley but I want something with more building. The multiplayer mod for Rimworld works pretty well. I considered vanilla Minecraft but it seems like the buildings don’t feel important enough without mods like FTB.

OpenTTD seems like it should be exactly what we want (also it’s free! And runs on weak hardware, and mobile), but maybe we were playing it wrong. Airports seem to give way too much easy money. And when we first played through we only made transportation for passengers, and I think we should have focused more on industry. I tried it again myself later and did better after focusing on industry, but it still seemed like airports were better money (and way easier).