I tried getting into Factorio and bowed out for this reason. It had kind of the same complexities as programming, except now instead of making my arrangements

I tried getting into Factorio and bowed out for this reason. It had kind of the same complexities as programming, except now instead of making my arrangements directly I now had to control a little animated sprite to walk around and place things. The spaceman as a character holds no compelling interest. I suppose there's probably some "pure design" mode that skips that tedium, but then the game feels shallow. You're design a bunch of dataflow pipelines organized on a 2D grid. Also the graphics feel washed out and grainy, and the whole alien species attacks thing was distracting. Playing factorio just makes me want to reimplement factorio. Not that I have the time or inclination.