I voted for it too! cool see it greenlit, It's looking a lot like a space version of King of Dragon Pass, a super cool old-school civilization builder, with a lot of text events and decision strategy, even the art and graphics is looking similar, if you never heard of this game, you really should check it out, for inspiration at least, it's a very good game! good luck!
Thanks
Several people mentioned KotDP, well, I would not say it's totally incorrect since some similarities there are (audiences, Imperial Court, managing governors) but calling it a KotDP in space would be an exaggeration. KotDP was event & stroyline based, with quite poor replayability (try to play it 10 times), I'm making 4X so replayability is a high priority here.
I was thinking about it a lot, how to handle it. Definitely the audience mechanic could be used for various storyline type events (which would become boring after a few plays...) but the majority should be done somehow else I think... More procedural and merged with the gameplay. Like you have a reccuring "Emperor was Poisoned" event and you can make some actions after it happens, you can affect it by investing in PoisonTesters (technology).
Alternative solution (or additive solution) would be to make storyline events but with randomized variants of some sorts (like there are only 2 main storylines but each comes in 10 variants or each branch has 3 random variants, variants are decided upon game start, so something that starts the same in previous game might unfold quite different).
Anyway, if you have ideas on this post, I will be implementing it quite late so there is still a bit of time.