[SolarNet]

Independent of the thesis of the article, which is obviously terrible, it does get much better very quickly.

The "gather resources yourself" stage is like the first 5 minutes of the game, more so to force people to automate; I actually think it's an intentional stylistic choice to demonstrate how they are different. Like the first technologies one gets automates all of the resource collection in the game (and later tier resources can't be collected by hand). It becomes a pretty good point and click strategy game very quickly. In fact after the first couple hours you can basically play the game from the map screen if you want, using blue prints to put down large buildings and spidertrons as units to move around, without moving your main character ever again.

Like this is how the mid game looks (user designed blue prints, bots build it automatically, etc): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0k1YeMm-6o