I've been sinking a LOT of time into
Star Traders: Frontiers, though I wasn't familiar with the franchise before.
It's turn-based, sandbox space captain sim. You whistle up a ship and crew, and then you're left to you own devices in an adventure that spans a couple centuries of game time (space travel extends your life, but not due to time dilation.) The world can be the default layout, or you can randomly generate a new universe of your own.
Apart from managing and customizing the ship, there's a variety of multi stage missions involving ship to ship combat, close combat between your crews or the variety of card-based minigames when you need to patrol, explore, block, or spy, and your crews skill directly impact the outcome. Getting your crew butchered by aliens is a distinct possibility.
There are storyline missions you can take or leave. You can thrive as a merchant, diplomat, mercenary, spy, and more or any combination of them at the same time. In addition to your captain, you are in control of your entire crew (20-60 members drawn from 30-40 character classes) and can fire/hire and guide their training to produce the desired mix of skills in your crew. Run the crew wrong, and they'll start deserting.
There is a series of eras that occur over the decades, with rises and falls of governments, plagues, invasions, etc. In each, you can become instrumental in changing things if you want. There's apparently a massive backstory, but I can't get into it, myself.
There's also a brutal diplomatic model, where making friends will automatically make their enemies hate you. Being a friend to all factions at the same time is just about impossible. You can win factions over, or pay them off, but until they like you enough to let you refuel your ship, they're perfectly happy stranding you in the backwoods of space, and their people will attack you on sight.
If you've played that sort of thing before, it doesn't have much new compared to others, but it combines the best features of the rest into what for me is the ultimate expression of the genre.
/rant