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There is an excellent remake (with an active modding community and real tricky AIs if you want to enable them) available; open source, no less! Remnants of the Ancients: https://rayfowler.itch.io/remnants-of-the-precursors
Civilization, Master of Orion, Master of Magic and Alpha Centauri are the four 4X gems. Unfortunately they don't seem to make those anymore.
My real favorite is Space Empires 3 though. Anyone else?
The multiplayer for that one is especially great. A few friends and I still play it to this day, it's a blast.
Ascendancy is my favorite classic 4X, still have the CD version and sometimes fire it up in DOSBOX.
In Master of Orion I you could have huge fleets of warships roaming through the space.
In Master of Orion II (significantly less successful if you ask me) there were a mechanics of "control" or smth along these lines, which limited you from having a large number of large warships by ramping up upkeep. I guess you could live with that.
Ascendancy is nice, but: You can only have N+1 ships, where N is number of your planets. This means you need to spend 90% of time developing planets (pushing "next building") with no ways to utilize your industrial output when not building a ship replacement. Boredom of managing insignificant colonies by hand is what ruins many 4X games.
It would be an understandable limitation if Ascendancy was a board game, but in a video game it's just a sign that game designers could not balance the gameplay.
Otherwise, great game. The music and the races are awesome. Tech tree is very funny.
Civilization, Master of Orion, Master of Magic and Alpha Centauri are the four 4X gems. Unfortunately they don't seem to make those anymore.
As another commenter said, Stellaris is a great newer one. A bit rough on initial launch, but well shaped up after patches and dlc.
The Endless X series is another one, but personally they never clicked for me, feeling oddly soulless and empty.
Ascendancy is my favorite classic 4X, still have the CD version and sometimes fire it up in DOSBOX.
Ascendancy is an example of how gameplay limitations ruin the game experience. In Master of Orion I you could have huge fleets of warships roaming through the space. In Master of Orion II (significantly less successful if you ask me) there were a mechanics of "control" or smth along these lines, which limited you from having a large number of large warships by ramping up upkeep. I guess you could live with that. Asce…
Master of Magic another cult 4X game is also getting a remake soon https://store.steampowered.com/app/1623070/Master_of_Magic/
It's not the same kind of game or as grand in scale, but I really enjoyed Into the Breach because each turn you only have a limited number of choices and units each turn, and each choice feels important.