It's also an incredibly cool, interesting game design. If you like Factorio + Tower Defense you should check it out.
I'm not sure that, on the whole, robust and performant software can be put together by teams much larger than that.
I'd prefer a factorio over almost another UI.
I'm imagining a port of factorio's UI into most strategy games would be very nice, both from a VERY zoomable map, a clear research/progression tree. A few improvements could be made IMHO, but it's lighyears better than TF, CS, the Chris Sawyer set, etc.
Like Factorio it's incredible and makes me wonder wtf I was doing chaining together bullshit service APIs in my day job.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/392160/X4_Foundations/
The expansion packs have expanded the size of the game world considerably, making the whole thing even more amazing
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/255710/Cities_Skylines/
I was bothered by this problem so I solved it for my own city builder game, Archapolis (still very early development):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q0l87hwmkI
I can path 200,000 to 300,000+ units simultaneously to random destinations, with a bonus of utilizing all shortest paths between two points.
The paths are all cached for constant time path finding, but I figured out how to do so efficiently (both building and storing tree/graph)
I wrote a non-technical article here:
https://www.yesboxstudios.com/2022/04/27/all-nck-shortest-pa...
It's still leagues ahead of any other game I've played though.
Their devblogs are really nicely written and you can tell they are extremely passionate about getting things right. In my experience that's a rarity now.
And of course, it's a brilliantly addictive game.