Distant Worlds could run itself, basically letting your empire run itself in the same way the AI NPCs runs themselves. The real beauty to that way of doing it was that you could take a very complex game and turn it into the kind of game you wanted. Maybe you want to tell fleets where to go but you don't want to bother about building/designing ships and organizing fleets. Maybe you want to focus on war but the constant diplomatic messages annoy you, so you let the AI handle that.
You could, conceivably, play a game where you literally only handle espionage for your empire. The AI decides everything from diplomacy, what to build and where, how to expand, who to attack, when to make peace, etc. And you are just trying to use your spies to further the goals of the empire. And I can even imagine that being pretty interesting, for a while. It was nice that the AI was modular enough to do all of this in piecemeal.
Anyway, I wouldn't knock Distant Worlds, they did some interesting things that a lot of 4X space games could learn from.
