I should've spent my time playing some other factory game; I have others I enjoyed more. I stopped when I was getting to a point of optimizing because I realized I was just letting the game sit to make progress, and I realized the ML had broken my economy and was wasting my time as a consequence.

A few points:

- Selling items is the heart of the game, but it doesn't work well. The ML-based pricing eagerly sets prices too expensive for anyone to buy. Manually setting prices is per-item per-cat per-store, so hundreds of things to edit if you really want to do it manually.

- Item prices don't scale in a way that encourages substantially better factories. Instead, it's mostly just a nuisance trying to make more items because factory management is clumsy.

- Research is essentially just a time-lock; it just takes money and researchers. With enough time, you can get everything. You don't really need to build better items other than to purchase more territories.

- You can make blueprints, but it'd be nice to have a simpler copy-paste of a group of buildings (you can copy one building at a time).

- You can place land and shallow water on anything. However, you have to place shallow water before you can place ocean. This feels like a pretty dubious design choice.

Various bugs, somewhat disappointing given this is an older game:

- Occasionally trying to move a building mysteriously copies it instead.

- Building the last of a building switches to a blueprint mode and you have to unselect then reselect when more are built.

- Movement sometimes glitches and you can run on water.

- Mouse clicking to add/remove buildings stopped working and I needed to restart the game.

It's just adorable and scratches that base building automation itch JUST right.

After two hours:
Good factory-builder with cats.