Of course, they simultaneously make it much more effective and efficient to run larger games on smaller computers. It's much easier to calculate and manage the allocation of abstract resources than it is to try and place them mechanically on board tiles.

From my perspective, it's a pretty vast improvement – though the problem is that it is harder to visualize and harder to communicate. In the next few patches we're supposed to see a little bit more feedback visually on the allocation of jobs and resources, which will help a bit.

I need to test and see if places that you can open a branch office are part of the Expansion Planner, because determining the best place to put a branch office involves a lot of clicking and poking around right now, which is hugely annoying.

Oh, Hades no.

Master of Orion was a turn based 4X game with a focus on space combat as the primary means of Empire interaction and a relatively limited scope of sets of planetary buildings. Your political set up mainly define how you earned money and gave you a few special powers. (And yes, the latest MOO absolutely sucked. I can make a cogent argument that MOO 3 sucked and was a terrible disappointment back in the day, but that's a different post.)

Stellaris has a lot more in common with the other Paradox grand strategy/real-time games in terms of level of abstraction and means of interaction between empires. Planet side development is more like province development in Europa Universalis 4, and balancing the political preferences of your population as a whole or making use of them to shift into more useful government systems is part of play.

Very different types of gameplay there.

Honestly, if you want to have more fun in the 4X genre at this point, you either have to go back and play those original games via emulation or jump into new approaches to interaction with those mechanics. Endless Space 2 is a far better 4X turn based game than pretty much most of the entries since MOO 2, and I might even give it the edge because of the role-playing/story embedded into the traditional architecture. Star Ruler 2 was an incredible real-time 4X game which never got the recognition it deserved for introducing real-time diplomacy and mechanics built around resource transportation. Stellaris slams right into grand strategy rather than "strategy" and bring something very different to the table.

The best thing about being a gamer in the modern world is that if you have even a little bit of curiosity about something, you can pull up tons – hours – of people playing games you've never heard of to find out if it's something that looks like fun. My measure is to see if I find myself screaming "you're doing it wrong!" at the screen. If I am, I probably want to play the game.