Arathain

The game I immediately thought of was Galactic Civilisations 2, which has a system of random galactic events. These would affect everyone- you and the AI players. You might get an economic boom or depression for an unknown number of turns, or everyone could get infested with spies and have to spend resources rooting them out. There were more serious shake ups of the pecking order, like informing the player that an AI player now has an ancient artifact that will cause them to become more powerful over time until they'll steamroll everyone, forcing the player to attempt to wipe them out. Or the Dread Lords could appear, and you'd have to find them fast and hope you can take them out, or lose the galaxy to an ancient evil. Now I'm thinking of Sword of the Stars, which had Grand Menaces. You could set how many you wanted to show up when you set up the game (one is usually more than enough!), but you wouldn't know which you you'd get or when, and each one had different consequences and had to be dealt with differently.

Didn't Flotilla so a little bit of that Battlefield Gothic thing? Ships have momentum, facing matters, that sort of thing. I played the demo ages ago, but I don't quite recall. Both Galactic Civilisations do the hex thing. Combat is fully abstracted and takes place on the main map.

"Endless space (i prefer the name Infinite Space though!)..." Oopsie. Stepping on Weird Worlds toes there.

It's sort of fascinating to me that so many people bounced off Infinite Space (although many liked it). I tried it out during the free weekend a little while back, and I found it perfectly competent, and perfectly unengaging. I can't imagine how frustrating that must be for the designers. After all, there was clearly some considerable effort to include colour. I thought the art for the various factions was quite lovely, and some of the faction descriptions intriguing (Horatio, a race of clones of one wealthy person- brilliant!). The planets that made up a system could have all these different properties- this one plants with interesting properties, this one has a strong magnetic field and that one has unstable geology. It made a difference in game, in terms of some numbers going up and down. And yet... meh. Yet Sword of the Stars, which has even blander planets and some similar systems in game can hold my attention for hours at a time, and I really feel the differences between the races. It seems so arbitrary, and even the panelists seemed to have a hard time nailing down what the crucial element really is. I was reminded of something from an earlier cast about FTL- that when we daydream about space we imagine ourselves as adventurers and spaceship captains- Han Solo and Picard- but never as some nameless galactic emperor. Yet so few games give us Firefly episodes and so many have us pushing economic sliders.