The game feels very lonely and honestly imo quite selfish in its objectives, deplete the planet to escape using your brilliant intellect, science cost is just time*resources. This is the opposite of my experience in life where no-one can do it all alone from scratch, everything is the accumulation of shared motivation, experience and unique perspectives.
Because the last couple of hours I basically just waited until enough resources for the last part of the rocket were built. I simply couldn't be arsed to rip apart the awful spaghetti code like things I have build to make it faster. It was really exhausting just sitting there ingame, knowing what i build works and will eventually produce enough but may god did it take its time for that.
From a game mechanic perspective, what I was missing in that game was a plateau at least of some kind. Since natural resources always run out the game was basically always forcing you to be on the go and keep on doing stuff, thus risking breaking something somewhere and then rushing to fix what broke all the while you originally were supposed to be doing something else etc. There was simply never a time were you could actually take a step back and take stock of what you build and take your time to try and work out on how to alter things to make them more efficient. Every change I made was basically never for the sake of streamlining anything. It was always a forced change by some external factor. Always. And this feeling of constantly being "chased" kind of reduced the replayability of this game for me.
Yeah but the feeling you get after having done that is so sublime that it's worth it, which is why some of us get so addicted to the game.