I had been searching for quite some time to find a good 4X game. Distant Worlds is still the best I have found so far. What I enjoyed most was the complexity. You can start by automating most of the mechanisms and, one by one, choose to control them manually. This is one of the games you have to play for several hours only so you can restart to play with enough comprehension to make acceptable decisions. I still would not give it five stars because it still has some rough edges. The user interface feels sometimes rather primitive. Some automations are just not adequate to be used efficiently. For example in order to build mining stations you can automate your construction vessels. But because they cannot distinguish between good and bad mine choices (ressources you need, amount of ressources on planet, distance, ...) you have to make mostly manual decisions in the early game. In mid game efficiency is not that important any more so you focus on something else but going to the late game you realize that most of them stopped working for some reason and are idle over your home planets. Playing the game it just feels like 3% more development would have made this game a lot better. All in all this is a game I have enjoyed for several hundred hours (on steam). I still bought it here, too because it was worth it.
