Microtopia

If you like playing with complex systems, I think you'll love this. Microtopia is well thought out, well polished, and has a ton of content packed in. It's clearly the product of hard work from passionate developers. The microscopic world of electronic ants is charmingly rendered while still easy to comprehend and manipulate. The chill background music practically hypnotizes me into a relaxing flow state when I play. Growing your population of ants in easy at first, but as you reach the population capacity of your current colony design, you have to start looking for new ways to grow. Your population capacity isn't an artificial limit, but the real effect of both how fast you produce baby ants and how long each ant lives. Death of each ant is inevitable, but the colony is a super organism that lives on. Population growth involves maximizing energy production (primarily to feed the queen who hatches all your new ants) and also investing in ways to extend your ants' lifespans. That includes affixing augmentations to old ants to refurbish them and empower them to do new things. Pushing the population ceiling this way is a fun challenge, and unlike anything I've seen in other factory-mechanic games. For example, those screws you've been manufacturing? You can set up a building to affix a screw to an ant and give him a drill nose. That will extend his lifespan and empower him to go mine for new resources and new production options. This game is definitely not trying to be Factorio. From reading other reviews, I think some folks went in wanting it to be, and were thrown off by the different concepts. But Microtopia does what it sets out to do really well, and provides all the tools you need to design and automate a bustling colony. There is some micro management, but not a lot, and it serves to give you a sense of active engagement in guiding your colony's organic expansion.