So I love the idea of the game. I am ready to build bases and ships like a madmen. However, is it worth it? Will these things I build ever be used for anything other than looking at and practicing on AI that doesn't pose a threat? Or is there some greater meaning to building things? If not, do the devs have anything planned?
Right now, there's only token enemies, and multiplayer does not work well enough to have PvP battles (unless it's just you and a friend copy-pasting spaceships in creative mode to fight each other)
The developers used to talk about putting in better AI using "good AI" which is a separate AI company that they created that's trying to make a real-life artificial general intelligence, but they seem to have quietly swept that under the rug at some point. AFAIK there are no official plans to add better enemies/AI anymore (though they don't talk about what they are planning to add very often anymore so who knows?)
It's called Space Engineers, the building part is supposed to be the cool stuff.
The problem is there's no problems to solve, so "building cool stuff" means "building fancy but useless showpiece ships". That's fine if that's what you want to do, but they should have named the game "space designers" or something since it's not really engineering at all.
The only engineering in the game anymore is software engineering. If you can program you can make tons of neat stuff with the program block, but for everyone else - too bad. The block selection for stuff like sensors, actions that you can assign to timers, etc is all so limited that unless you use the program block (which "cheats" and has access to drastically more game data than it should) you can't do anything really cool.