Both games price reduced to the same $16. Which one should I get?

For me, Distant Worlds falls into that trap of "game I'd probably like if I could actually get into it". The tutorial is literally just a wall of text pop-ups that doesn't do a sufficient job to actually get you started, and many of the game mechanics are complicated for the sake of complication. The sheer amount of information it bombards you with makes it difficult to find the information that's actually relevant to what you're trying to do, and the consequences of your actions is rather opaque. I gave the game a fair shake, investing several hours into it, but rather than feeling like I was getting traction I just lost interest and returned to other games.

Polaris Sector isn't perfect, but it's definitely the more streamlined of the two games. The game mechanics are very straightforward, and if you're familiar with the genre you probably don't even need a tutorial and can figure things out for yourself. The planetary economy is easy to understand, and the real-time battle sequences make the ship designer feel more impactful. One thing I particularly like is that the game lacks those "low impact" decisions. You know the type, those "get 5% bonus to metal production while twerking under the full moon" type deals that just distract from the grand strategy. While there's still the occasional fiddling with loading up carriers and the like, most of what you do is focused on the big scale and I quite like that.

With that said, Polaris Sector does have some flaws. The AI is incredibly campy, which can slow down the game to a crawl as you slowly break down its multilayered Maginot-line style defenses. And if you go too slowly, it'll have built a new defensive line behind the last one by the time you get there. Espionage is a micromanage nightmare that requires the patience of a god to utilize, and is completely gamebreaking if you do. Game balance is poor, with some races and empire customization options just being vastly superior or inferior to others, although as a singleplayer game that isn't a deal-breaker. Finally, the difficulty jump between normal and challenge difficulty is astronomical.

Thanks Darvin

I also contemplated which to buy and decided on Polaris.

Distant Worlds has crazy value. All the DLCs are included (and there were quite a few!). Reading other players remarks about the game, one thing that got me to seriously consider this game was them describing how the game made them feel like they were telling a story. There are a lot of things to explore and discover.

Polaris is the new shiny and the graphics are much better than Distant Worlds. Gameplay is probably not as deep as DW but is much easier to get into. You are not as overwhelmed with options in Polaris as you are in DW.

I disagree with the statement that Polaris is easier to get into. In addition: The tutorial of DW may be a bit text-heavy, but at least it does contain valuable information, while the tutorial of Polaris is more or less useless (it doesn't even address research, one of the key features of Polaris).

I played both games at some length and I find both interesting and fascinating, for different reasons.
- In DW, the player determines the degree of automation. You can automate more or less everything and watch the PC play the game (it's almost like watching a movie :-)). Or you can micro-manage everything, down to the lowest level. I myself tend to play the "emperor role": My underlings propose actions, and I approve their proposals or not. If necessary, I take action myself, of course. This lets me play relaxed games, watching the events unfold, but also being able to influence the story.
It's true that the different ways to start the game (owed to the integration of all DLC's) can be overwhelming initially. But you can always start a game with default settings.
- In Polaris, I like that quality is more important than quantity, especially in the early game. No colony- and research-spamming like in many other games of the genre. You have to set priorities when it comes to ship-designing, ship-building and colonising, and the star-lane approach makes you think about strategic systems, choke-points. And I like the approach the game takes to research (although it could have been presented a bit more intuitively and user-friendly in my mind). In a nutshell: You invest your research capacity in abstract and applied sciences, and you have to consider the inter-dependencies between these two areas.
To get started in Polaris, I recommend to read the 3 guides available in Steam, especially the "Quick Expand / Landgrab Guide", which can serve as a nice tutorial for the first couple of moves, too.

To the OP: I think it would be unfair to say one game is better than the other. Both games are good in their own way, but appeal to different play-styles. Both are real-time pausable, in DW you can fly freely wherever your engines take you, in Polaris you are forced to star lanes. Read descriptions and reviews. Chances are high that you'll like the game, if it supports your personal game-style.

The thing about Polaris' research system is that you can just ignore it if you want to. All techs will come in over time if you leave it to its own devices. The thing about Polaris tech system is that you're not so much choosing what to research, but what not to research. By turning off research in certain categories, you speed up every other category. Researching everything evenly (the default setting) is actually the most efficient approach in the long-run, but in practice it's better to give up a few categories to advance faster in select categories. Until you've actually had time to try out everything though it's not really possible to make an informed decision on what you're giving up so it's better just to leave it in its default state (or, at very most, slowly move the balance slider to favor applied science over the course of the game) Well, strictly speaking you do want to be building colony ships any time you're not building military units or the occasional fuel tanker, but that's because it takes many decades into the game before any of your colonies are big enough to support shipyards of their own so the shipyard on your homeworld is a major bottleneck and its time needs to be treated as a valuable resource. You won't have enough time to build all the ships you'll want so you really need to be religious about keeping it queued up, and colony ships are the best economic investment in the long-run.

I do agree with you on research; don't get me wrong, you want as much research as you can get, but you will absolutely tank your economy if you go too heavy on it. Research colonies have massive food consumption, produce no resources to help pay for the construction and upkeep of your fleets, and it takes centuries to reach the real game-changer techs. I do find that you want to put up a dedicated research colony as soon as possible (because they take longer than any other type of colony to fully mature, so you want to start that growth early) but getting your resource income and food production up takes priority early on.

Interesting comments - thanks!
I myself am more familiar with DW than with Polaris, probably because DW is older (and I spent more playing time with it), and I find micro-management cumbersome (I do assess every single proposal of my "underlings" in DW, and sometimes decide differently :-)).
While it's probably true that in Polaris everything will be researched eventually even when I do nothing, I found that I run quickly out of planets to colonize when I don't research ways to colonize more worlds (domes, etc.). And I'm not sure that my oppponents will leave me alone until I have researched what I need to defend myself.
As an aside: For people who like both DW and Polaris, Endless Space 2 might be an interesting alternative (or addition). Immersive, many different ways to influence progress and events (just watch how your production and research times change when your people get unhappy and run away or elect a different type of government!), and it's not starlanes or direct flight: You start with starlanes, but soon discover that these give you access only to about 20% of the game universe, so you have to find other ways to explore the rest ...

For me, I feel like I have to understand what is being automated before I feel comfortable with using the automation. The tech system was confusing, but I very quickly figured out that left to its default everything would just research evenly, and I figured that if I didn't know what anything did there wasn't much point in tweaking with that. After the first game I experimented with priority research into atmospheric domes (I think everyone comes to that conclusion fairly quickly), then after getting a better understanding of the weapon system I started to tweak my research to accelerate towards the techs I wanted. While true, those are all things that are pretty low on the tech tree and the ideal place to start experimenting on your second game. Most of the tech paths don't even open up until after you've already completed every atmospheric dome tech. While on the higher difficulty you'll usually need to priority research to survive, for someone learning the game on normal difficulty the techs come in quite comfortably and you're unlikely to run into problems. Certainly there's more than enough leeway to ease yourself into the tech system on your second or third game.

One thing I will add is that one of the strongest race customizations I've ever come up with completely gives up on priority research. Logans, radioactive world (10 points), heavy ion gun (4 points), food consumption (6 points), research flexibility (-5 points), espionage (-3 points), trade (-2 points), everything else neutral. Try it some time; Logan Fighters with Heavy Ion Guns are pretty much all you need all the way into the mid-game, and free radiation-resistant atmospheric domes with reduced food consumption is the holy grail combo of the early-game lab grab. It may take a few tries to get the hang of it since the early economic composition will be very different from other approaches, but the economic boom it can support is staggeringly good and not nearly as map-dependent as more YOLO strategies. Will look into it, thanks

Sounds interesting - will give it a try. :-)