Civ doesn’t compare at all, it is nothing. Completing the main scenario (building a silo and launching a rocket) can take days to weeks if you jump in with zero knowledge.

Factorio is the definition of a dopamine drip. You start with a pickaxe and work your way up through the technology tree. Coal, coal-burning mining rigs, smelting furnaces, conveyor belts, coal-burning inserters, steam generators, electricity, assemblers, vehicles, oil processing, chemical processing, better generators, better automation, more complex materials… and that’s just the individual items. You’ll have to build assembly lines for increasingly complex items, transport networks with conveyor belts, pipes, or trains, find raw material quarries and wells because everything is finite, then either manage air pollution or expect to be overrun by alien bugs. Small individual steps, but they add up very quickly and there’s always something to do.

I’m forcing myself not to buy the recently released expansion because I know I’ll lose days to it. If you have ADHD or a thing for automation, it is stupidly addictive. The factory must grow.