Yes, Rimworld is easier to get into for many. "Survive" is a way more obvious and natural goal.
But once I got more and more into the details, Rimworld was the one frustrating me. I probably just despise this kind of "Storyteller" aka Event choosen by Wealth & RNG. This ruined the fun for me and is probably the reason I played Factorio easily 10 times as long as Rimworld.
The closest Factory has to that is the pollution mechanic, but that doesn't feel nearly as contrived.
Not sure it would be fun for me with something like a peaceful-mode.
Combat is a useful "problem" to solve/prepare for. But having understood those are just randomly selected, totally interchangeable events (that btw, actually change after reloading a save) made them feel arbitrary to me.
Added to this, the difficulty of those events is fully determined by some arbitrary "value" of all the stuff in your settlement combined together. Build a big wall around the settlement? Value just went up. But not if those were natural mountains. Thus to beat the game, you want an effective defense while keeping that arbitrary value low. And this just kind of killed the immersion for me.
Thing is, I also don't see a good way to avoid such value driven systems when designing a survival-game that is supposed to keep being challenging. There is little risk of "game over" in Factorio or Oxygen Not Included once you got past the initial challenge and it becomes more of a SimCity than survival. Civ becomes a chore. Games like Don't Starve have a high skill floor and the restarts made me loose interest just about when I had learned enough to get through winter. "Go to harder area"-games just incentivize not taking risks. Time-based difficulty is an OK compromise at best...
Factorio is a sandbox game where you are free to set your own goals.
As a new player, my goal was to explore everything the game had to offer, and that meant researching all the technologies in the game and learning how to use them effectively.
A secondary goal is to make efficient use of space, which is limited by biters, base layout, and resource layout.
Another goal is to automate as much as possible instead of hand-crafting.
Yet another goal you might have is to defend your base against the biters to go after them pre-emptively. If you enjoy the combat in the game there are a wealth of ways to get more of it or increase the difficulty. On the other hand, if you don't like combat you can dial it down or even get rid of it entirely.
Mods increase your options exponentially, and give you much more new stuff to explore and use.
Like any sandbox, what you do with everything you're given is up to you. The limits are: your interest, your skill, and your imagination.
But doing so hardly ever gave me a feeling of closure (excluding the 8h achievement speed-run) I got after finishing some story-based game and the "you won"-screen has a "keep playing" button for a reason... I expect most player use it.
If the core game loop doesn't bring you satisfaction and you don't find motivation in setting your own goals, then this game just isn't the right one for you.
That was the original goal, at least over a year ago. They have since extended the tech tree requiring you to launch lots and lots of rockets containing satellites in order to acquire Space Science packs.
But once I got more and more into the details, Rimworld was the one frustrating me. I probably just despise this kind of "Storyteller" aka Event choosen by Wealth & RNG. This ruined the fun for me and is probably the reason I played Factorio easily 10 times as long as Rimworld.
The closest Factory has to that is the pollution mechanic, but that doesn't feel nearly as contrived.