If your life goal is to optimize for "productivity", then you will of course encounter your issue. I imagine the vast majority of people seek out leisure activities. What I've found that Factorio does for many programmers is that it hits the same dopamine receptors that productive programming does, just in a non-work context. A professional football player should be able to enjoy playing basketball in their off-time because it's another athletic activity and not feel the guilt of improving their football skills.
There is a fine line between "this game exercises the same parts of my brain as my day job, but with a vastly different set of restrictions and consequences" and "I stare at a screen exercising this part of my brain all goddamn day and the last thing I want to do in my leisure time is stare at a screen using this part of my brain even more".
I am an artist; I flirted briefly with Minecraft for a while, then looked up from a flawed first attempt at an underwater glass dome at 3AM, decided I would much rather exercise my creativity in a realm where I can show it to other people and maybe make some money from it, and uninstalled Minecraft forever.
I don't think you're alone there. This was EXACTLY my mindset as well.
I have the same problem with the various Japanese logic puzzles (Soduku, Nurikabe, Hashi, etc):
1) This is fun!
2) Hmm, I'm using the same algorithms to solve every puzzle
3) I could probably write a solver
4) Don't write solver. Move on to something else.
Exactly, I only played Factorio and Dyson Sphere Program when I was depressed. Every other time if I feel bored or burned out enough to try to play a session I think about my list of backlogged greenfield great ideas and immediately end up doing one of those. They are honestly just as creatively rewarding and fun in the greenfield stage at least.
Factorio is right on the cusp for me. SpaceChem, too. TIS-100 was a bomb for me; if I'm literally writing code, it better end up in a GitHub repo.
With Factorio for me, I always reach a point where I know how I'm going to scale up, and then I lose interest in actually doing so. Just knowing that I could do it is satisfying enough.
I love construction/management games but I very rarely "finish" them for exactly this reason. The moment I can see exactly how I would go about making it to the end goal, I'm done.
I haven't identified with a HN thread in quite a while. The moment I understand how to do something or that it's possible, I'll drop it. That includes my personal projects.
On the one hand, it is a vastly better debugging experience. You can see the entire state of the machine, and easily step through the execution.
In contrast, with my day job, I'm dealing with incomplete documentation, poorly designed and very large libraries without adequate comments or organization, subtle bugs that only occur in unidentified situations, etc.
But at the end of the day, TIS-100 felt more like work or a hobby project, so I'd be better off doing one of those.
Factorio has trains. Also, at my programming job they frown on the use of shotguns, flame throwers, explosive rocketry, and the use of tactical nuclear missiles to solve problems.
My experience was similar. I tried Factorio once, and gave up because it was very tedious, and too much work to consider it fun. I would have liked to enjoy it, but it's not for everyone.
I've found myself following a similar thought progression. For me, the difference is that in Factorio I can decide to completely refactor my base and not have to deal with any angry stakeholders or teammates that disagree with my direction.
The biters do make refactoring a bit more tricky. Got to at least keep base defenses up and running. That could be seen as the equivalent of keeping existing users happy.
That's also the reason I don't play games like these. Programming scratches the same itch for me and has fewer limitations.
Still I enjoy the absolutely insane creations of some people in those games. I'll never forget the Doom-style 3D engine[0] someone created inside Factorio, with (iirc) a clever configuration of trains as a huge graphical display.
I have this feeling often, but I still go back to games. To see any fruits of my efforts doing real programming would take days or weeks at this point, and I want to do something that more or less immediately rewards me for my efforts.
One thing I don't see mentioned on here often is actually rather surprising. Modded Minecraft! There are a lot of highly technical mods that are focused on providing resources that enable mass automation, and many modpacks that push the limits of that concept.
Some of my favorite modpacks are Enigmatica 2: Expert, Omnifactory, and one I just started recently, Divine Journey 2.
They all have a similar process of starting with nothing but a book full of quests to guide your progression, and end up with you automating everything from farms to quarries to mob grinders in order to produce items that have comically difficult "recipes" to craft.
Scratches the same itch as Factorio, Zachtronics games, Satisfactory, etc. but often has some fun side goals such as making your factory look beautiful, exploration, fighting bosses, and best of all, getting your friends hooked on the game and playing on a server in a group!
I've been on the fence about Satisfactory, but I just checked Notch's twitter and the dude is STILL sitting there playing it all day
The man's rich enough to be swimming with whales or partying in space and he's sitting in his basement playing Satisfactory.. there must be something to it
Bitburner (a game in which you use javascript to "hack" computers... not really hacking, but really using your javascript skills)
Screeps (use real programming languages to harvest and compete for resources... sort of like an RTS, but where you program your units instead of directly telling them what to do)
Neon Noodles (use a simple visual programming language to program robots to make sushi... super innovative game, with a free demo on steam... highly recommended)
There are a couple games from Zachtronics that literally have a programming component to them (TIS-100 is almost all programming, but with a weird computer).
Mindustry has a little programming if I recall correctly -- mostly it is tower defense and resource gathering, though.
EDIT: As you can see, everybody was excited to bring up Zachtronics. Really neat developer.
1) Hmm, this game is a lot like programming. A lot like it.
2) Maybe I should just program? That is real work & I can get done more work done, be more productive.
3) [stopped game, started programming]