Avorion

Genuinely, by complete coincidence, it's the second game in a row where I still have some old notes left from 2017 when I was writing them for every game I added to my wishlist. I'm not sure how many more games I have notes on but haven't gotten around to playing, but I can't imagine it to be many. Back then I said Avorion "seems to be some kind of Space Sandbox, but I can't quite grasp the main point of it from just briefly looking at it." I don't think that's a wrong assessment. Avorion is indeed a space sandbox, and as sandbox games often are, the goal is a bit arbitrary, and more what you want to do yourself.

There are a whole bunch of features in the game, and while there's a rudimentary tutorial and an encyclopedia in the game to help you learn (not that anyone reads the latter), it can still be very difficult to get a grasp on things. You're only taught how to build a ship, mine resources, fight a couple of enemies, and then told to go figure out some ancient mystery of how to get to the center of the galaxy which has been blocked off by rifts that prevent hyperspace travel.

A very large part of the game is ship building, with everything you own having to be made block-by-block, module-by-module by yourself. There are a lot of customization options with many decorative blocks, coloring, using different shapes, etc. This was easily the part of the game that caused the most friction for me, because I'm not a creative person in the sense of making things with no functional value. I still attempted to engage with the system by making spaceships that looked like spaceships, even if that took more time. Sadly, that backfired, as smaller blocks were significantly more likely to break off, causing you to lose whatever functionality they had or weapons you had mounted on them. The optimal thing was to just make a flying box, using 1 of each functional block, scaled to however large it needed to be, stacked like a sandwich. Also, cover your engines with armor making them visually impossible to use, but the ship-building engine doesn't check for that.
I really wish that since they put so much focus on making your own ships, that there would be more incentives to vary their designs a bit. Like directional thrusters were great, because if you actually understood how torque worked, you knew exactly where to put them for maximal efficiency. That idea clicking for me was the one enjoyable moment I had in ship-building, everything else was just a forced disappointment.

The rest of the game was this expansive simulation of the galaxy with the hundreds (or thousands if you count all the pirates, probably) of factions inhabiting it. Each faction owns territory, has stations, sends out ships to attack other factions, mine, or whatever. It looks really cool, but you realize after a while that aside from some random times pirates maybe occupy a small area, all the factions are actually static. There's no struggle of power, no expansion, nothing of the sort. But the player can still do all those things.
But let's start small. You start with a single ship and basically have options to go mining, trading, or pirate hunting. Mining is the simplest, but doesn't make a lot of money. I still mined my own resources for my ships though. Trading is better at making money and also safer, but figuring out what to buy and sell where is such a chore. You can equip a module that slightly helps, but actual spreadsheets, noting down the prices everywere, are so much more effective, but boring to make. I understand having built-in functionality to remember the prices of everywhere you've been would make trading too easy and strong because the prices are static, but that's a failure of the economy balancing. Finally, combat. This is the most fun and most profitable thing to do. Killing pirates, which there is no shortage of, gets you lots of money, lots of weapons and modules as loot, and greatly improves relations with the local faction.

Another big part of the game, that I didn't engage too much with, is the automation or RTS part. See, just about everything you can do manually, you can do automatically. If you make a ship, you can give it a captain and have it go mining, trading, or fighting on your behalf. This was not explained at all in the tutorial, but is very important for making money as well as tackling larger opponents. At higher tiers, your ship just won't cut it against a whole fleet, so you need a fleet of your own, which needs more money to make.
But it all gets kind of repetitive. There are 6 tiers of resources, and some story quests that you can do while moving up the tiers, closer to the center of the galaxy, but each tier is mostly the same. Acquire the building knowledge and then upgrade everything you have to that tier. One of the reasons I didn't want to engage with the automation aspect early, was because my stations and things built in the outer rim of the galaxy lost a lot of relevancy when moving to a higher tier, and rebuilding them all would have been bothersome.

I still played several tens of hours of this game, and despite many of its flaws, it's better than any other space sim I've played. It's just that the genre itself is not a very thriving one. I'm really sad to see all the wasted potential of this game. It desperately needs more incentive to do various things, more variety as you progress, and a deeper simulation that makes the world actually dynamic. These are all very hard things to make, but right now it's just too much of a boring sandbox - the sand is static and you can ignore most of the tools in the sandbox in favor of the cookie cutter.
Regardless of all the flaws, I had enough fun for quite many hours, and so I'd be disingenuous not putting this on my favorite games of all time list. It's at a low place on the list, but until we get another big space sim that manages to be better than this, it will probably stay on there, and it will be the space sim I recommend to people.