The best simulation games like Steel Battalion are Armored Core VI, MechWarrior 5: Clans and Elite Dangerous. Below are 7, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to simulation costs you.
Filtering to simulation means you want a system to run or a routine to inhabit. It is the right filter when what you liked was being somewhere rather than beating something.
What you get: A game that does not need you to be good at it, and that rewards paying attention over reacting quickly.
What made Steel Battalion worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the simulation part of that answer, and only the simulation part.
The best modern mech game, and the one that treats the machine as a machine.
Heat management, torso twist and a cockpit — the closest to Steel Battalion's weight.
For the same ritual of powering up a complicated vehicle before anything happens.
The most elaborate cockpit-procedure simulation currently playable.
Operating industrial equipment as the entire game, and superb at it.
A submarine that needs several people to run it properly.
If the switch-flipping startup sequence was the actual appeal.
Urgency. Simulations are deliberately slow, and the ones with no fail state give you nothing to push against.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Steel Battalion that are not simulation games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Steel Battalion — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Armored Core VI. The best modern mech game, and the one that treats the machine as a machine.
No. Steel Battalion released on the Microsoft Xbox, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
A simulation with no fail state and no time pressure. The label describes how it feels to play rather than what genre it is in.
No — one is about running a system well, the other about inhabiting a routine. Recommending across that line is where most simulation recommendations go wrong.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Steel Battalion list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is simulation — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the simulation guide for where to start in the genre generally.