DF gets all the news (rightfully so, it's an epic game that I've dumped a ton of hours into) but if you haven't already, consider checking out Songs of Syx. It's like DF but multiplied by 100. You can have tens of thousands of citizens, doing most of the things they do in Dwarf Fortress, and a lot more, including waging huge wars against the neighbors. The limits of DF kinda made me sad, actually, that you are limited to so few Dwarves (and don't say it's because you want to know the story of all of them, because after 30 or so you lose track of who is who anyways, so might as well up the limit from 100 to 50K, or more? ;) Songs of Syx has also routinely been getting massive updates since 2020 and I have a feeling the code is a bit cleaner so the solo dev can add features faster (unlike DF's code base which is, according to one of the new devs a nightmare to work with). It's a game that is never talked about but deserves a whole lot more love from gamers.

I don't mean to cast shade on DF, I really do love it, and am happy for its existence, I just think that DF fans should also look into Songs of Syx.

The defining difference for me are the generated stories in DF, which often are a lot of random trash but still give a feeling of a deeper meaning.

I lost the best part of a week of my Christmas break to it when the Steam version was released a couple years back...

Wasn't that meme initially created by players talking about Civ games?

Factorio is a game about bird songs.

Sleep is the bottleneck.

You won’t get me this time.

Not everyone on hackernews is paid SV salaries?

That plus flights from Australia are expensive enough in economy, business class is easily 4-10x that cost.

When I fly transatlantic I don't mind paying to get an exit row or bulkhead seat, but even just premium economy is a much more significant increase in cost over economy, at least flying from Canada.

I remember being a high paid techie getting 19 hours of paid work done between Melbourne and New York, on a laptop in economy (and a long layover in LAX due to a storm). It was fricking glorious, most productive day of my life.

Not everyone on here is necessarily from SV?

Business class flights from Sydney to San Francisco cost A$6k, 6-10x as much as economy. Flights from Sydney to Europe are more like 3-4x (A$7k vs A$2k) but still ludicrously expensive. Good luck convincing your company to expense that for work trips, and most of us don't have SV salaries. Honestly, I still manage to get some work done on long flights, the more annoying thing is flights which don't have power outlets or WiFi.

If you are a point hacker you could spend the points on upgrades (which tend to give you better rates than buying base tickets) but then you're paying for a minor comfort improvement that you wouldn't pay for normally -- which is a textbook example of induced consumption and is playing into exactly how airlines want you to use points.

It’s incredibly expensive on international flights, right? A 12 hour flight sounds like something that would cost thousands for business class.

There's no better story generators than those games though, even Civs don't quite compare.

Check out Terra Invicta.

It's like the modern-era Paradox game you wanted but all the mechanics synergize with each other.

Unfortunately it's a bit too complicated as a result.