izigame.me

Factorio / Satisfactory with no combat and a light emphasis on exploration, Dyson Sphere Program is factory management at its finest.
You control a robot, resembling that of Bumblebee. You manually gather some basic resources, wood, stone, iron, copper and craft some buildings which automate the gathering of important materials. Miners gather ore, forges convert the ore into other basic components, such as ingots. Assemblers take these components and create yet more components, and before long, you are creating a half dozen different components. Slowly, but you are producing them. All of these components are delivered from machine to machine via the use of conveyor belts and sorters, which I affectionately refer to as, grabbers.
All of these materials are being created in service of, initially, creating cubes. Lots and lots of cubes. Blue ones, then red ones, then yellow, then purple, then green, then finally white. As you advance to a new cube colour, it becomes quickly apparent that production of the materials used to produce the previous cube colour needs to be increased in order to maintain production of the previous cube colour and the current cube colour you are beginning to produce.
These cubes are used to upgrade various aspects of the game, which are generally broken down into two categories: Bumblebee upgrades or technology upgrades. Bumblebee upgrades consist of things like speed or inventory increases, while technology upgrades consist of new buildings or new components to manufacture.
The actual game flow is not describable. It is repetitive, filled with laying down a row of dozens of buildings, assigning each building what to manufacture, laying down multiple conveyor belts to deliver each component required to produce the item that machine will be making, and a conveyor belt to deliver the finished product, and finally plugging in manually, one at a time, a grabber / sorter into each machine for every component being taken in and the finished product. A single assembler for example, might have four conveyor belts that need to be placed, three grabbers manually placed for the three components, and a fourth grabber to output the finished component. Oh, and then there is power. Luckily, power is not as tedious as other games as it is wireless, and a single tower will cover a small area, generally a grid of 4 forges or 4 assemblers.
As of right now, there are several must have addons that make the above, much less tedious, and it is my guess that these addons will eventually be incorporated into the game. The addons include BeplnEX, which is a prerequisite for the rest of these addons, CopyInserters (allows one to copy a building with the same grabber setup as the building being copied from), and advancedbuilddestruct (allows structures like power poles to be placed in a line with equidistant spacing by using the alt key with the + or - keys to change the spacing). These addons are installed by first installing the addon manager, r2modman, searching for the addons and installing them through r2modman, then clicking the launch modded game button.
The developers have been very good about introducing features to reduce some of the repetitive nature, including, in a recent update, the ability to do in place upgrades for upgrading structures, grabbers, and conveyor belts without having to remove the structure and replace it, so I suspect the above mentioned addons will soon become obsolete and incorporated into the game.
One more addon, highly recommended, MineralExhaustionNotifier, which notifies you of statistics on all your active mining operations without having to manually travel to a location. This includes notifying you of how long a vein has until it is depleted, any alerts on any miners, how much ore is left on a vein, etc. My hope is to see this incorporated into the game as well.
Once you are crafting the third cube, you are introduced to interplanetary mining. You soon discover, there are other planets to visit, each with their own resources to gather. Many of them you can land on and explore. A handful of them are gas giants with products like hydrogen and deterium. Gas giants have their own unique method of gather resources, via the use of orbital collectors, which must be placed at the equator of a gas giant. Maximizing production requires the use of 40 orbital collectors per gas giant, as task that is a time consuming adventure (provided you have the materials, an orbital collector can take as long as 15 minutes to create, depending on what you have already produced).
Tearing down, rebuilding, optimizing, restructuring, screw it, Im doing it all from scratch but better this time, this is a factory building game, and Dyson Sphere Program is no exception. As advancements in technology are learned, new structures become available, allowing for entire swaths of a factory to be eliminated and restructured for better optimization.
For example, sulfuric acid, a product used in the creation of yellow, purple, and green cubes to make graphine, requires oil, water, and stone in varying amounts. Getting the exact ratio of each coming in so that each machine is both producing constantly, and so you have enough machines outputting enough to keep up with the machines using this acid to create graphine, is a pain. When you discover that sulfuric acid is trivially able to be mined from planets in other solar systems, as an unlimited resource (it never runs out), the entire production chain for sulfuric acid can be entirely eliminated, making the entire structure and setup of your factory much less complex.
Expansion to other solar systems, 100 or so hours into the game, becomes important. Rare resources that further reduce the complexity of your factory become available on other planets in other solar systems. Then, near the beginning of the production of green cubes, and certainly before any production of the final cube colour, white can be made, you begin production on the final phase of your death star, the Dyson Sphere. It has all led to this point, the culmination of 100 hours or so, leads to this moment.
It is at this point you realize, oh my God, I am not producing near to enough of everything, and must then massively ramp up production. Launchers send dyson sphere components to surround the star and envelop the star with solar panels, resembling the appearance of a death star, but presumably, without the ability to destroy other planets, or without the obvious missile hole weakness. You need a lot of these components. A lot. Like mucho mucho mango lot. What is required to make these components? Pretty much everything you have been making up to this point.
It is here you begin to realize, large swaths of your factory must again be rebuilt and further optimized. You will need the north and south poles of your planet clear for optimum rocket launching efficiency.
If none of this sounds appealing, but you made it this far, I am glad I entertained you. If you are looking for a game with light math skills as a requirement for maximizing efficiency, this is that game. If repetitive gameplay is something you enjoy, alot of this is that.
Repetitive is not a bad thing. In a sense, you could think of this as an idle clicker without an offline component. You will configure, setup, streamline, then let the game sit idle overnight while cubes are created, waking up the next day to have thousands of cubes necessary for a few items in the research tree. Unlike an idle game however, most of the game is active, structuring, restructuring, rebuilding, optimizing, tweaking and in general, getting it just right.
And that is mostly what this game is, just right. Provided they keep combat out of the game (I do not play a factory building game for mediocre combat mechanics), and they incorporate the functionality of the addons I described above, this is about as close to perfection as it gets, outside of some small things that could be added.