4x/Economy/Colonization

4X/Economy/Colonization games.

What games do this best? I love the comfy feeling of building up cities or colonies from scratch, and managing resources.

Recommend me some games similar to Imperialism/Civ: Colonization/Settlers, etc.

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Wikipedia claims pic related is a 4X game. I didn't realize they could be action?

My problem with a great many of these games is that expansion of micromanagement in late game to the point where they become exhausting. What are some games that attempt to address this successfully?

Distant worlds has a helpfull AI management.

I can't get into distant worlds. It either plays itself or i drive my empire into the ground on anything other than easy difficulty. Just how should i balance automation? I tend to spam "build mining station" a lot and always end up with queues not completing, or a complete lack of resources to build shit because there aren't enough mining stations.

Well for starters, I've found that the AI is competent at waging war but absolutely retarded when it comes to when to start or end them. It seems to be fine at managing mining stations (mostly) but you ought to go out of your way to select certain places for mining. You can just select a million things if you like, but it is going to take awhile for it to chug through them (build more construction vehicles for faster building, goes without saying). I'm almost entirely not-automated now, I just let the machine run the actual battles (mostly). Because I absolutely hate military micromanagement, it's boring, frustrating and lame.
To try to summarize, I'd recommend no more automation than Ship Design, Intelligence Missions, Station Construction, Fleet management, Colonization and War waging (but not declarations). I personally manually control the former two as well as everything omitted.

For tips on what mining stuff to build and what not to build, check out your Expansion manager (or whatever it's called, it's the blue jigsaw thing). It can show you how many sources of all materials you have (sources are mines or stations that mine), how many you have stored, how many you have unfulfilled, how many are in the galaxy and maybe more. What I generally do is look at what's unfulfilled and try to scout out a source. Aculon, Nekros stones, Steel, Lead, Gold, Caslon, Hydrogen (and Helium?) tend to be pretty useful, specifically Caslon (fuel), Steel and Lead (building material), I think, are commonly necessary but like I said: Check the expansion page, it'll tell you what you need and what you have none of.
Or, in short; Build mining stations when your empire needs that resource but has no source, or not enough sources, other than that probably pass. It's also better to build mining stations in a solar system where you already have a colony (with a spaceport, preferably) because of how resources are moved around. On that note, I've also found having spaceports at every colony to be extremely useful, cuts down on refueling times, increases happiness (and therefore tax revenue), protects the colony (a little) and a myriad of other benefits.

Also, nice dubs.

You could always play Sword of the Stars. Expansion and colony management is pretty hands off in the first one. So it ends up as a bit more of a war game with various Star Trek like alien threats showing up occasionally to fuck your shit up. The second one is a completely different beast and the AI used to have an issue with bankrupting itself because it had no idea how to effectively manage their stuff.

Caesar III. Vid related, although he's not playing very well, so don't feel like you have to play his way.

Wikipedia is staffed by retards.

Basically any time a guy spends a lot of time discussing his strategy and talks about frustrating problems that trouble him, take that as a sign his strategy isn't actually very good, since the point of a gameplay strategy is to minimize frustrations. The whole donut layout shit he does is not necessary either and by his own admission he fucks himself out of the better houses by doing that.

For a proper scale progression to occur (which I think it one of the greatest allures of these types of games), management down to the finest details should be able to gain you an advantage early in the game. Then, at some point when players have expanded or progressed technologically far enough, it needs to stop providing that advantage. As long as micromanagement gives any sort of advantage to the player that does it, players are going to do it. So the idea should be perhaps to research a technology or setup an infrastructure at some point that performs these sorts of high-detail managements automatically and most optimally once a civilization has progressed to a certain level. What are some 4X games that do this?