PC Gaming

Emberward would be right up your alley. It's a rogue-like TD with terrimono you customize during your run. It just went 1.0 last week and has 96% positive ratings on Steam with almost 4,000 reviews. It's also currently on launch sale.

You could give Sanctum and Sanctum 2 a try. They are “FPS Tower Defense” games where after the tower building phase you go in and blast the enemies by hand alongside the towers.

The FPS combat is not particularly hard because it is still a tower defense at its core, but there are some enemies that are easier to kill by hand than with towers because they have armor and take much more damage at their weakpoints and the towers aren’t very good at aiming at the weakpoints. Also there are some interesting build crafting options, especially in Sanctum 2.

It’s the earlier work by the team who made Satisfactory.

These might not be for you but I want to provide a couple of options that aren't exactly what you're asking for but are pretty close. No offense taken if you think they are terrible.

Lonestar - Top down space rogue-like where you place modules in your ship to synergize damage output. Also known as 'space math'.

Sunless Skies - Steam punk space train set in the Fallen London universe. Emphasis on exploration and the setting just oozes style. Also the soundtrack is awesome.

Halcyon 6 - Take control of a space station and try to put together a fleet to replace the one that gets nuked at the start of the game.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker. Game about cutting up spaceships with lasers and gravity tools with a bit of a narrative.

It's not a great alignment for the types you identified, but I like all the things you mentioned and found this quite nice.

Two games I will suggest:

"Captain of Industry" is a colony sim/automation game, in addition to production you also must care for a population of workers. Production is more complicated than, say, Factorio because most thing have a waste product.

"The Last Caretaker" is a bit different, you're a robot, on a boat, after the end of the world. You run around fixing machines, fixing your boat, and you sail to locations to find resources to do whatever it is you were built for. There are things that will attack you but that isn't what the game is about.

Now Im going to lurk your thread for more suggestions.

A pretty chaotic mix but I tried to imagine games that would deeply reward close engagement over long stretches, a game like Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead is a game you can come back to again and again for the rest of your life!

I've been having a really fun time with vintage story, a.minecraft alternative that goes for detail. It has stuff like crop rotation, a realistic (compared to minecraft at least) steel making process. I think it offers a lot richer and more varied experience than vanilla minecraft, and is surprisingly good about not forcing you to grind.

You'd love space engineers.

Genshin Impact

sandustry is pretty cool, it’s a 2d falling sand based factory builder. early access now iirc, and still new enough that there’s not a lot of guides or tutorials available.

i really dug it bc it REALLY appealed to the min/max part of my brain. every little efficiency boost felt like a discovery lol

The Planet Crafter might be your jam.

I loved minmaxing and grinding around in Grim Dawn and Timberborn. You might too. 👌

If you want a fresh jaunt in an mmorpg I highly recommend Guild Wars 2. Starter accounts are free so no cost in trying it. Amazing story, plenty of content, and the best community of any multiplayer game I've ever played. Hope you give it a try!

I found Journey to a Savage Planet and it's sequel enjoyable, FPS puzzle platformer where you explore and document the local flora and fauna.

The Isle is a nice time sink, you play as a dinosaur and have to grow and survive, maybe live long enough to start a little dino family. You want to change the game version to Envirma (sic) as that is the version currently getting developed.

Timberborn definitely. Also, Factorio, which has a better balance of simplicity, complexity, and interface automation than Satisfactory or Mindustry, as well as a different goal. Also mods lmao

My favorite game to play when I am sick is Banished, a medieval city building game that was the labor of love of a solo dev. It starts off quite brutally difficult until you learn the best ways to handle the first winters and then it becomes a cozy opportunity for optimization, and a challenge to balance expanding the city as much as you can while supporting the population with agricultural and forestry goods. It's inspired some other games to follow in its footsteps, and it has a modding community still making content for it.

If you've never tried it before, Dot Age is a fun little time sink made by an Indie dev. It's a city builder people/resource management type game where you're trying to build a successful village to survive a coming apocalypse. You have to plan ahead and deal with upcoming 'bad events.' A run is like 5-6 hours long and there is a lot of variety between runs thanks to building variants, etc.

If you enjoy automation, tower defense, survival/building games Rimworld might be of interest to you. Enjoying committing war crimes is optional but a nice bonus!