Dyson Sphere Program Review (bobbodaskank)
As other more articulate people have said better than I could, this game appeals to all those same glorious pleasure centers that Factorio does.
What I'd add is something this game helped me to overcome in my perception of these kinds of games. Factorio, Factory Town, Satisfactory, and Dyson Sphere program are the "automation city builders" that stand out to me from modern indie devs. All of them have this interesting quality: the game is fun for a certain reason when you start out. Then there's a difficulty spike somewhere down the line, and then the game is fun for a different reason. I've always found it natural to play with the first "phase" of the game. But I've always had a hard time with the second one.
What that translated to in Factorio was looking up tutorials online. It opened up my ability to engage with the endgame to have the early game smoothed out and min/maxed a little. However, I always had this nagging feeling that I'd deprived myself of something. You can't "unlearn" the knowledge of how to do things efficiently. Certainly that doesn't mean I couldn't possibly refine my early game any further or try other things, but it did mean that I sort of "skipped" part of the journey of maximizing efficiency on my own.
Along comes DSP. The thing about Factorio is the "end game" of building the rocket is barely an endgame at all. You can stop when you launch the rocket, but it's practically as big a change for your factory as adding in your purple and yellow science are. In DSP, finishing the ostensible "goal" of the game (building one or more complete Dyson spheres) is somewhat more monumental. It's an aesthetic victory.
Remembering my situation with Factorio, I told myself I wouldn't look up DSP content online, because I didn't want to spoil the growth curve for myself. And... I faltered a bit. Right at that difficulty spike I mentioned before, somewhere after making my first yellow science. I realized I needed to rework my factory, that its layout was flawed to the core, and I went to restart. But I found myself not wanting to try. I tried again some time later, same thing. Just stopped after half an hour and moved on.
I started again recently and decided to just... look up some tips for base layout. Fine, game, you win. I lose. But as I got going, and as I reached that spike, it felt different. It was still a spike. Even if I knew what to do next efficiently, it was still a challenge. But more importantly, I realized how badly I wanted to get that sphere built.
That's when I had my important realization about city builders: I'm not a "build your own crazy cool thing out of legos" guy. I'm a "build a pirate ship out of a pirate ship lego set" guy. I want that sphere done. I don't want to invent it. I didn't "lose," I just started playing the DSP I wanted to play.
I liberated myself to enjoy this game by allowing myself to engage with community content before beating the game on my own. If you want to figure out how to get to the something, and you're someone whose reward is the journey instead of the destination, by all means, challenge yourself in this game. It certainly gives you that journey. But if you just think wrapping a star in a massive superstructure would be cool to witness with your own eyes and would happily accept some help in making that happen, just be that person.
This game's great. It's a spectacle. It's a puzzle of optimization and efficiency and scalable design, just like its contemporaries, but I'd say that you can tell just from the prologue narration that the designers wanted to afford you the chance to bear witness to something just as much as they wanted to present you with a challenge. Enjoy it how you want. This game is rewarding just from engaging with it. You don't have to play it a certain way to get the full effect.