Maybe that's why I don't enjoy it... Feels like I could be getting work done on any of my side projects when I play. Don't have that same feeling when I'm playing other games.
That being said, I do enjoy it at LAN parties because I just build walls and hunt biter nests
The comment that really made it click for me is that there are two diametrically opposed responses for engineers playing Factorio:
* "This game is scratching the same itches as my day job, but with more dopamine and less bureaucracy - how can I play this all the time?"
* "This game requires me to expend the same brain-effort as my work/side-projects, but I don't even get anything tangible out of it? Why would I ever 'play' this?"
Neither of them are wrong - and I suspect that the same person might even have different reactions at different points in their life.
I'm square in the second group. Factorio is fun for a while, but after somewhere around mid-game you realize that it's much more frustrating and less enjoyable than actual programming.
I can't easily "refactor" parts of my factory without fearing it will break some pipeline that depends on the changes. I wish there was a way to "write" "tests" or do mass changes safely. Blueprints and robots help automate things, but it's not that flexible.
I wish I could use a "debugger" and step through the execution and play with changes to see how it affects the factory.
And then I finally get to the conclusion that this would all be easier from a text editor using proper programming tools, and more enjoyable to work on a real project that could have tangible benefits (and then never finish that either...).
Most of my games ending when I realized that I have to rebuild half of my base because of some thing and I don't want to spend so much time with inactive base. And my internal perfectionist can't live forever with quickly-hacked sub-par solutions.
I absolutely understand where you're coming from. The closest thing I found to "tests" was that you could hook up alarm klaxons to belts/containers that would alert you when a certain resource was below a given level - but that's very much a in-production canary of "tell me when things are going wrong", not a mid-development "tell me how this change will end up looking".
That being said, I do enjoy it at LAN parties because I just build walls and hunt biter nests