It plays like a much less polished (but perhaps prettier) factorio (considering it's early access this isn't necessarily a huge problem. Certainly factorio was

It plays like a much less polished (but perhaps prettier) factorio (considering it's early access this isn't necessarily a huge problem. Certainly factorio was far less polished when it was first available on early access). I feel like the bits they've added (3d and space-flight between multiple planets) aren't adding much to the factorio formula at the moment and at the same time make some of the polish in factorio difficult to implement (e.g. due to the heavily curved surface of the planets I don't see how they could make blueprints work well). The lategame seems to drag on a bit because of this: there's a lot of rebuilding of the same infrastrucure on different planets and it can get a little tedious. In comparison to factorio there's less interesting automation puzzles to solve and less tools to solve them with (no trains and no circuit network, for example. They do have things like multiple outputs from one recipe but there's not a great way to balance them). I feel like if they lean into the differences from factorio there could be an interesting game that's differenciated from factorio: factorio ultimately winds up building towards automating the automation: in the endgame you develop ways of building more and more parallel factory in an efficient manner, using blueprints and robots (and the megabases generally develop a standard pattern for placing these down, speeding up expansion even more). I feel like DSP could go in the other direction: instead of building more of the same basic components, have an upgrade path with more advanced buildings with higher throughput, perhaps with a more complex set of intermediates alongside to make for interesting automation without the repetition (this idea is already present in some of the minecraft mods which inspired factorio and some factorio mods: basically e.g. you can do one iron ore to one iron plate, or you can do one iron ore to two ground up iron ore to molten iron to 2 iron plates, and process 10 plates a second instead of 1). This would perhaps allow a bit more of an epic scale that comes with the idea of building a dyson sphere, as you could build up many orders or magnitude from where you started, as opposed to maybe three between start and end.