I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
∆V: Rings of Saturn is a top down realistic physics based space mining game. I love the game but the high frequency of random encounters made the game feel less like a mining sim and more like a space combat game where you have to survive against constant pirate attacks.
While all that sounds bog-standard for a space sim, it’s the realistic science that kills it. High speed mass driver rounds from far off map, mining lasers outside the visible spectrum (only revealed with steam or dust) that will cut right through your ship, microwave beams that cook the crew alive and are impossible to evade - the game is not made for such weapons with the very limited combat format.
It became unfun to have a load of minerals that took IRL hours to harvest become scattered across Enceladus orbit as the added mass of minerals made my ship unmanageable during evasive maneuvers causing me to slam into an asteroid.