My favorite game to play when I am sick is Banished, a medieval city building game that was the labor of love of a solo dev. It starts off quite brutally difficult until you learn the best ways to handle the first winters and then it becomes a cozy opportunity for optimization, and a challenge to balance expanding the city as much as you can while supporting the population with agricultural and forestry goods. It’s inspired some other games to follow in its footsteps, and it has a modding community still making content for it.

This was exactly my play too, mind locusts were crazy OP, especially with movement bonuses over Xenofungus. I usually played Zahkarov over Deirdre but the result was always the same, lol. A planet covered in Xenofungus and a massive mind worm/locust army. That game is so good, I was immensely disappointed in Beyond Earth. It couldn’t live up to the original unfortunately