tbh, there is a bit of a steep learning curve / bafflingly bad interface thing going on with them but theyre the best of those kind of games imo.

Theres also elite dangerous, but I could'nt rally get into that. Because the galaxy is real sized with billions of stars everything is necessarily samey and bland. Also its sorta like an MMO you need to be checking out forums and engaging with the community to actually find out what to do. I do not want that from my privateer-likes. I want to just be able to completely immmerse myself in the game and explore on my own and find cool things and possibilities and implement my own schemes.

Disclaimer: Ages ago I coded the GPL Vega Strike http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/ engine on which the privateer remake operates -- you might need to run in xp compat mode unless you checkout the data dir