Stellaris

I bought this game a few years ago and I used to play it a lot.

Unfortunately, my computer could barely keep up with it. I had to play relatively small scale games just to keep my graphics card from burning up (relatively low end graphics card compared to decent CPU and RAM. Bad combination.)

I could run it again now, but I'm not that interested. They changed up the dynamics of how planet development takes place to a point of micromanagement hell. I enjoy mostly enjoy the micromanagement, but it feels like they dropped the ball with the latest system. The complete rework of the planet-colonies became much more confusing and disengaging than any other aspect of the game. It was so bad that I had to stop playing.

The intergalactic wars in the game feel MUCH better than they did in the beginning. For a long while, AI would greatly favor a sort of "wait too long and we will become invincible" sort of logic style in conflicts. This was refined and adjusted to a more reasonable extent in later patches to the point of completely reworking space combat entirely.

Stellaris reminds me a lot of Civilization but with even more of a focus on war. Being diplomatic can give you relatively strong alliances over time, but you're much more likely to be forced to fight if your enemies are immune to diplomatic measures. Sometimes this is even the case for empires that are simply Xenophobic rather than just outright immune to trade and diplomacy.