Still, I agree with you that there's some missing depth in the game that no mod has yet been able to fill for me. I say this after sinking (pardon the pun) thousands of hours in to the game and having a tremendous amount of fun.
Still, it could be deeper in some way.. not sure how.. maybe by adding some LLM/AI of some sort?
Don’t forget, we’re playing the Bad Guy here, who tirelessly exploits a foreign ecosystem and kills its inhabitants en masse. We quickly lose sight of the initial goal of escaping and just keep building _more_ only to be able to build even more quickly at scale.
The community motto is: “The factory must grow!”
Imagine something like 7 days of constant biter attacks on all fronts, with biters much stronger as well. A relentless strain on the economy of your base more than anything, with there being a real need for repair bots to fully repair and remake certain sections of the perimeter as it gets destroyed by perhaps some special baneling-esque biter.
Add to this the idea that things get infinitely more and more difficult over time, and you instead compete for places on a leaderboard of like "survived 400 days and 14 hours".
Of course, you can crank the biter difficulty, but you only get two outcomes: it's too hard and you can never build a base that lasts more than an hour, or you manage to arm yourself from the beginning and biters stop being a problem very quickly.
I'd really like biters to be a threat I need to pay some attention to for the duration of the game. Evolution isn't really a factor because as you say, once you have laser turrets, you're set. Even red bullets suffice.
During main gameplay your resource extraction and expansion is driven mainly by the sink of ‘research’ - turn resources into science, science into unlocks.
Additionally, biters eat bullets, and occasionally factory parts that need replacing.
Other than that the main sink for all your resource gathering is just ‘more factory’ of course.
The end game resource sink of ‘space rockets’ just never felt to me like a very satisfying thing to shoot for - though getting to the point where you can just expand onto a new mineral patch and reliably deploy blueprints that turn it into rockets is pretty cool, I’ll admit.
But there’s a part of me that is left slightly unsatisfied by the fact that we can’t reach sustainability, and we aren’t getting anything for all the resources we process.
Give me a little population of friendly alien creatures (who biters prey on) and make my goal to maximize their population, perhaps. I don’t know.