Pigs in Space
Tea Leaves has started what looks like an interesting series on Space 4X games (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate): Pigs In Space.
The politics of 4X games are always problematic … the assumptions are colonial, imperial. Although distinctions are often made for different types of governments, mostly this ends up as being a serious of modifiers (Capitalist receives Industry +1) rather than being a real determinate factor in the gameplay.
One of the other issues has always been complexity … I have great problems getting involved with games that require the ability to compute 10,000 variables in your head in order to work out the outcome of an action. Galactic Civilizations 2 was one of my picks for last year largely because it managed to make so much of the underlying complexity intuitive.