It's telling that Stellaris's combat system offers less control than MOO's and that it has no spying. Another good example is the approach for diplomacy - the latest DLC won't have a UN victory condition like MOO but it will have the ability to issue Resolutions.
These days I would enjoy a 4X empire building game that focused on the absolutely highest level issues I imagine a ruler of a galactic empire would focus on. That is, managing the empire and maybe space fleets at the highest level, not issuing orders to individual ships or planets. Maybe dropping down to a particular theater of conflict or diplomatic crisis if the situation calls for it. And at the same time, making it enjoyable, of course!
Nothing kills my enjoyment faster than old-school micromanagement. R&D, ship building and handling, resource gathering -- my serfs should be doing that, not me, the emperor. I'm no longer a teenager with lots of spare time :)
For a certain kind of self-actualized casual gaming, it might actually work. You have to trust / live with the bad choices of your automatons, yet also remember to tell them when you want to change direction.
When the game has relatively few options that can be played to a high depth, like Chess, of course, it's easy to write such a competent AI with a brute-force approach. But that's usually not how 4X games are structured: there are a ton of decisions involving overlapping timers and resource bonuses and force committments, and so the top-end strategy revolves around leveraging everything in a just-so way to accelerate growth and minimize losses.
The move towards lower micro and symmetric balancing in newer games has the upside of downplaying much of this; your advantage, where you get one, is much less likely to come from careful micro employed to replicate a 50% advantage in a single scenario hundreds of times, and AI benefits as well. But it also loses some of the charm of weirdly unbalanced 90's strategy.
Basically, it's a game emphasizing and focusing on roleplay. The early game is absolutely brilliant. But it has way too strict rules and there aren't many meaningful (combat or diplomatic) interactions with the AI past mid-game once you've exhausted most events * .
The war AI is a joke once you've grown enough, and diplomacy offers very few options - maybe the latest DLC will help with that.
So you are left with either slowly conquering the galaxy (because the wargoal system is stupid, I'll get to that), or basically doing very little - diplo is only slightly more fleshed out than MoO, Federations only make sense for some Empires and don't do much yet - and waiting until the Crisis, which is bugged enough that it's no longer that much of a threat.
There are also the drastic performance issues some players have mid-late game, or how the economy revamp (a good idea in theory, tiles needed to go) didn't reduce micromanagement, but arguably increased it. Again, early game Stellaris is awesome, but later... not so much.
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As for the wargoal system, unless you're playing a genocidal (FP/DE) race which almost removes diplomacy, you're limited to wars with very limited goals with 10-year ceasefires * . There's no way to break those ceasefires, despite it not making any roleplay sense.
By comparison, in MoO sometimes an AI race will attack one of your planets without declaring war, and sometimes I just have to take in the chin, because I'm nowhere near strong enough to fight. At which point I might begin methodically planning revenge while being nice-nice diplomatically.
This is actually something that can also happen the other way around, with the player being the aggressor. AFAIK, there are no fixed rules in the MoO code for that - this is just an emergent property.
Stellaris, despite the large number of fixed events and mechanics can't support that kind of interaction, because the mechanics are implemented way too strictly, and you can't just send out ships without formally declaring war with fixed pre-set goals limited by Influence and if you did have a war, you'd always have the large diplomatic malus with the faction and no good way to try to appease the AI.
* Events are basically fixed storylines choices written by Paradox, where every choice makes a small difference. Compare GalCiv which also had that mechanic, but GalCiv's choices are far less detailed and GalCiv had a moral scale mechanic which wouldn't have been a good fit for Stellaris
* Well, there's the Vasselize-Annex method, which is almost as slow because it costs a lot of Influence.
I should have also mentioned that Stellaris has some DLCs which are de facto mandatory, which is just the way Paradox does things. Utopia is all but officially required. Apoc I guess I should have bought. Leviathans is IMHO very useful too. Not sure if anything else can be called mandatory?
TBH other than Utopia all the "big" Stellaris DLCs have felt rather lackluster to me. I'd much rather have Distant Stars or Ancient Relics or even the Lithoids species pack than Apocalypse or Megacorp. Of course I've bought them all except for the Humaniods pack anyway on sale because I absolutely love Stellaris and have put a massive amount of time into it. Even with all of its flaws and quirks it and KSP are still my favorite PC games.
In theory it means a loss isn't catastrophic, but in practice if they can beat you once they can beat you again, your only real hope is to find allies--and when you're weak it's unlikely you'll find allies.
Computers solve this issue and let us expand these grand entertainment fantasies into massive endeavors. I think about this for Civ a lot in particular: There's nothing stopping you from implementing the whole game on paper. But... imagine calculating resource yields for each of your 10 cities on every turn, and then applying them to game pieces, building, etc. Not to mention tracking 6 different victory conditions, and dealing with the geo-politics? It would be really hard and time-consuming.
It further excites me that as computers continue to grow and technologies advance to predictions, quantum, etc., there's a lot of room for games to grow in complexity and increase the amount of 'throughput' a player can push out. When humans have control over things beyond their physical limits, we tend to do some pretty cool stuff!
XCOM (the original) to this day remains one of my favorite turn-based games. How you grew attached to your troopers! The remake is pretty good, too.
How do you find Stellaris, by the way? I'm tempted by it but at the same time these days I simply don't have time for time-consuming, micro-managed 4X games that feel more like work than fun.
pretty much covers Stellaris. It might have been salvageable if the world were interesting, but despite all the ways they let you customize your faction I never feel any attachment to them, to say nothing about the AI-controlled factions. Other games may have only a few factions but they all feel genuinely unique and different.