Ultima VI? Kind of worse than UVII in every way though, but people did have their routines.
Serf City: Life is Feudal? A city builder/war game, where your serfs tend to go about their business by themselves, sort-of. Not really that deep, but mesmerizing in a way. I used to use it as a CPU vs CPU screensaver sometimes.
Anamnesis might fit the bill. The other factions go about their business quite happily. Here's a linky to the bay12 thread:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=118981.0 EUIV/CK2 has a heap of interaction and CPU people doing whatever they want. It's not really at a personal scale, but CK2 can be a pretty good (assassinate whole families, imprison another, promote random schmo's who aren't a threat, then let them work it all out). Also has a pretty good Game of Thrones mod, in case you know more about television than history.
Merchant Prince did have a bit of a passive/aggressive world going, with people struggling to become pope, doge and all that. The interaction is pretty limited though.
Colonization feels fairly worldy, with natives doing stuff, enemies doing stuff, the motherland doing stuff and you trying to win in amongst what can seem like random events. Try FreeCol, because it's, errrmm, free.
SMAC/SMAX had a great game world, with the opposing AIs sticking to their modus operandi pretty well. Diplomacy wasn't too bad really.
Some of the newer versions of Pirates! had an agent based system where you could stop events happening or cause them to happen by interceding. Not sure how good it was if you just left it to its own devices though.
Maybe TBS games shouldn't really be on here, or grand strategy. I assume you mean more personal, smaller scoped games?