I've been alternating between Cosmoteer and Trouble Shooter.
Cosmoteer is like a cross between factorio and starsector. It's nominally a space combat game, kill pirates, mine stuff, upgrade your ship etc; but the bulk of the game is really in ship design, which is the factorio part. You build ships block by block in whatever shape etc you want, but apart from the usual mass/thrust tradeoff, everything is abstracted to your crew members doing stuff. Like to power a laser, you need to have a reactor, and crew assigned to carrying batteries from the reactor to the laser, as well as crew member to fire the laser. It's a little strange, but it adds a strong optimization layer to ship building, with travel times and routing becoming very important.
It's my current record holder for fastest time to game over on normal difficulty - I picked a starter ship, launched from station, attacked a nearby pirate hunter and got blown out of the sky, all in less than 20 seconds ;p
It took me a bit to get into it - there's some significant skill required in ship building, and you will fail - a lot - at 'improving' your starter ship to begin with, but I am enjoying it. If ship building isn't your thing, technically you can just add some of the hundreds of ship designs other people did from steam workshop and just swap to those when you have the crew/resources, but I am not sure that space combat part by itself is really in-depth enough to make a full game.
Trouble Shooter is basically an anime version of x-com. The SWAT teams, struggling with huge numbers of super powered criminals, call in teenage vigilantes to help them out. The premise is pretty silly, especially having the troubleshooters as independent businesses and stuff like 'arresting' criminals with a frag grenade or a two-handed sword to the face.
The gameplay itself is great fun though, the combat part has all the usual stuff you'd expect from x-com style games with elevation, cover, etc, but adds in colorful characters with various super powers. Each of the team members also has a choice of three different classes, various equipment slots and a 'mastery board', which is basically a really customisable talent tree where you can slot in abilities into various 'buckets' ( like attack, defense, support ) where the size of the buckets is determined by the class you are using. There are a *lot* of abilities ( 800+ ) and they have a huge variety of hidden set bonuses which you can discover. Organising the board is almost like a game in itself. The abilities, or 'masteries' are essentially drops from certain types of enemies or given as 'insights' during story events.
Add in diablo style loot, crafting, pet taming, robot construction, character synergies, etc, and there is an crazy amount of content.
On the downside, there's a story that might be ok, but I have no patience for actually following it, given the presentation format is 90s JRPG standard one sentence speech bubble, click for next type stuff. Fortunately for heathens like myself, there's usually a 'skip' button. Your mileage may vary depending on your tolerance for that stuff.
Oddly, it's one of the games where increasing difficulty actually makes it easier because the difficulty adds more enemies, increases the number of elite enemies and makes things higher level, all of which give more experience, causing you to increasingly drastically outlevel everything you are fighting. If you actually want some difficulty, there's an optional toggle called 'limited growth', which prevents your guys from getting xp if they are over the recommended level for the mission - I think turning that on is pretty much a requirement.
Overall thumbs up from me, it's a huge game and it's dirt cheap - definitely worth a look from anyone that likes tactical RPGs I think.
Side note: hiring a traumatised 12 year old girl to go into combat zones because she has heals makes the MC look like a real dickhead ;p
