I can totally understand doing a non-DF run, they are a cool challenge in the early game and their special buildings can really help with ramping up late game but they can be a bit annoying to deal with. The DF Lab in particular is a huge help if you are going for one of the big science achievements, because I think it is 2x as fast as a base lab. I wouldn’t play with DF again myself until they flesh out the space combat more, dealing with the space hive right now is kind of cumbersome because it hasn’t really been fully implemented yet.

I may have honestly played every factory game on steam at this point. Shapez was great, I am looking forward to shapez 2. DSP / Factorio / Satisfactory is the holy trinity of factory games to me at this point, but I think everyone knows those.

Captain of Industry is a great one with more real-world production chains and some light colony-management as well. It’s pretty challenging and you can get locked into a death spiral pretty easily. There are difficulty settings that can be adjusted on the fly that help with that though. I like more of a sci-fi setting usually, but this is a pretty cool adaptation of real industry.

Desynced is a lesser known SF factory builder that adds some programming elements. Basically everything are logistic bots rather than belts, but all the bots can be programmed with a decently robust visual programming language. All the buildings/bots you build are modular too, with components that you slot in. I like shoving some solar panels on all my carrier bots so that they contribute to my power grid while transporting cargo.