An engineering game, as I'd define it, is a game where a primary gameplay element is designing machines for some purpose, weighing conflicting needs such as cost, versatility, and performance. I've only played a handful of these games, and I really wish I could find more. Here are some of the ones I've enjoyed:
Kerbal Space Program: I'd call this a definitive example of an engineering game, and one I have hundreds of hours in. I absolutely love designing rockets, figuring out what I'll need for each mission, experimenting with different staging mechanisms to maximize fuel efficiency, pushing my available tools to the absolute limit to land on far-off celestial bodies, etc.
Automation: The Car Company Tycoon Game: Yes, I know, fuck cars, but I'm having fun with this one. There are a lot of different niches you can cater to, and I enjoy specializing in affordable, reliable, fuel-efficient sedans and compact cars against the trend of turning everything into a gas-guzzling behemoth.
Master of Orion: Yes, a DOS game from 1994, and primarily a 4x, but its ship designer has some of the best balance between simplicity and depth I've ever seen. Ships have a limited hull capacity, but no fixed number of weapon hardpoints, and they can only fit a handful of special modules, but there are dozens to choose from, with widely varying capabilities. The number of actual choices to make is small, but they involve balancing so many things - durability, damage reduction, damage output, armor penetration, weapon range, maneuverability - and the turn-based combat gives enough control to let you really appreciate the impact your designs have.
Avorion: A space flight sim with highly customizable ships built out of blocks, with fine-grained control over things like engine power, maneuver thrusters, and armor thickness, and cargo bay sizes. I wanted to like this one, but it's way too grindy for me (building up your reputation with factions takes forever, and they won't let you buy better ship equipment until you do).
Robocraft: A game where you design a robot and then pit it against other players' creations in online team battles. My best creations were a spider bot that could scuttle up and over hills and ambush enemies with a massive plasma burst, and an air defense bot with bigass twin AAGs and a shitload of top armor. I had a lot of fun with this one back in the day, but nowadays it's so deserted that most of the players are bots.
Is there a game like this but for constructing buildings, villages, and means of production? I barely play any games, so maybe I'm just describing Minecraft or Civ. But I played Valheim with my friends when that game first came out, and I got so invested in building a village for the group that I didn't even play the main story line.
Basically I think I'd really be into a game which is like a historical materialism simulator. Starting from building a small village community, building defenses from the elements, improving means of production and discovering new technologies, class conflict as new technologies wipe away the social basis for old traditions, conflict with other civilizations, etc. I feel like I'm just describing Civ (haven't played) but is there one which is more first-person?
Edit: let's say it's a game where you take the role of Hegel's Spirit but also hop into the body of an individual character at different times, kind of like a cross between Civ and Minecraft. It would be cool if a server would last several months or years, with players logging in and improving the society somewhat. If you don't log in for a month, you might come back and find that the user base advanced the server from feudalism to capitalism, or maybe two parts of the map went to massive war against each other.
Rimworld, especially with tech/automation mods.
There's also a game which is interesting as a case study. It's called Eco, and the premise is basically "minecraft but you have to solve global warming with market-based solutions." The neat thing is that if you just don't engage with the market mechanics at all and instead be climate Stalin it's extremely easy to beat the game and fix global warming.
Just checked both of those out. Eco looks like it might be what I was looking for! Watched a video where a guy joined a server of "red team" and "blue team", and the reds/socialists way out produced the blues. I think the multiplayer aspect is what intrigues me, as long as it doesn't allow wreckers to ruin everything.
RimWorld also looks interesting, the randomness mechanic I think is really good for a single player game.
The way simply doing socialist production trivializes Eco reminds me of Vicky 3 players saying that communism is overpowered.
RimWorld is fantastic. People meme about it being a war crimes simulator but I always build postscarcity utopias.
Rimworld players I’ve watched annoy the shit out of me for this. They’ll mod the game to max out difficulty cause they’re hardcore, but then their strat tends to be the cheesiest most boring schlock imaginable.
Absolutely agree. A weird one for me is embrasures. I always mod them in because A. They are a real world extremely effective and dead simple construction for defending fortresses, and B. Club beating rifle because of the way accuracy and distance scaling work in RimWorld is stupid.
But many RimWorld players see them as inherently OP, while preferring goofy ass killboxes that exploit the enemy pathing.
You're mostly describing the genre of "Colony Sim" (like banished, rim world, space haven), most max out at the city level but a few go a bit farther (Manor Lords, dwarf fortress). Civ and other 4X's focus on the country management side with Coty management abstracted through resources like food, production, science etc.
As for your edit: you might want to look into modded Minecraft multiplayer (I haven't played in 8 years [oof] so info is outdated). CivCraft, and Hardcore Faction Craft both did exactly as you were describing. Of course you mentioned Valheim, similar to it are Rust and Ark.
Kenshi has some of this, but... uh... Kenshi is real weird. But you can build a village, set up farming, get beat up by tax men, bake food, get eaten alive by beak things, trade your food for raw materials, fight off murder gorillas, upgrade your industry to produce more sophisticated components, make war on ninjas, begin producing electronics, have your skin melt off in acid rain, and end up cranking out bleeding edge cybernetic prosthetics and giant buster-swords made of alloys that never dull while you try to grow strong enough to defeat the removedster.