An oldie but a goodie. When I first picked it up, I was a little worried that it was going to be a spreadsheet game, balancing one set of numbers against another, mixmaxing the right formula to convince the AI to do what I wanted.

Luckily my fears were unfounded. There are a lot of numbers, but you don't have to dive any deeper than you want to--while the AI races are simulated to a deep level, you only need the surface stats to see what's going on. And while a lot of the gameplay requires numbers to go up (your influence, interplanetary relations, planetary conditions, etc.), you have a wide variety of tools to affect those numbers: tactical space combat, treaty-making, influence-peddling, even long-term research/mining/construction contracts. It never felt like "I need to increase this number"--I was always doing something.

The other thing I really liked about the game was how different the races were from each other. There were the warlords who only respond to bribes, blackmail, and duels to the death. Or the robotic capitalists that want to see the profit in every action. Secretive spymasters that get annoyed just from talking to you. Or the hive-mind that will only negotiate on matters concerned with its current priority, but is susceptible to irregular mood swings. It's a bustling solar system that truly has a life of its own. I could just watch the simulation play out if I wasn't so concerned with preventing them all from killing each other.

There's one caveat to my recommendation though: It is an old game and doesn't play well with some modern systems. It crashes fairly often on my laptop, though the autosaves mean I never lost too much progress. I've also run into a bug that effectively froze time in my solar system, meaning I couldn't complete that game. Steam's two-hour refund window should be enough to see how well it plays, but do be aware that it is old and might do better on an older machine.