I can recommend turning off biters, or at least biter expansion. That way you can at least focus on building your factory, without getting distracted by attacks.

Using a main bus where your factory is built in comb like rows on one side (so you can make the bus wider on the other side) is simple and will work pretty well for the starter base (i.e until you fire your first rocket and "win" the game).

I often split my starter factory in 4 quadrants with sufficient space for belts between them:

1. Smelters

2. Main bus based factory

3. Oil processing

4. Personal fabrication and mall (especially once logistic bots become available)

> Factorio feels less like a game and more like managing a complex software architecture.

There is literally a mod [0] for integrating Factorio with Grafana. Yep.

[0] https://github.com/remijouannet/graftorio2

I had the exact same experience as you until I finally tried it for a third time. After working through the tutorial I was completely hooked. I had quite a few hours of fun until I decided I was playing too much and had to delete it. I would agree the learning curve is fairly steep. It's not complicated, just dense.

My issue with it is the same that I have with things like Shenzhen IO. It’s fun to solve such problems but only with the right tools. Restrictions become very irritating when solving something like a programming problem, especially when it’s “refactoring” related