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[wereboar]

http://mush.twinoid.com/

[Neonivek]

http://mush.twinoid.com/

My warning for that is while it is amazing! It requires an investment.

Basically imagine playing a League of Legends game that can last days.

Mind you these are just warnings not "Game is bad".

[Cheedows]

Along the same vein as Mush, Neptune's Pride is a fun long term game. However, not quite the active involved game in the background you're looking for.

[sambojin]

If you're not too concerned what year it ends up as, the Simcity games aren't bad. Sure, your power stations blow up every 50 years, but on medium/slow it'll probably take an hour or more for that amount of time to tick over anyway. SC2000 is probably my fave for stuff like this because it's really simple and not too much can go wrong (just turn disasters off). You can even dosbox it, so virtually anything will run it.

Transport Tycoon isn't bad either. OpenTTD is free, runs on anything, takes a bit of run time to play anyway, and as soon as you've got some profitable routes in can be left to run for ages if you want. Sure, your competition might have more routes set up, but that's half the challenge. I'm pretty sure you can turn off stock buyouts, so you're safe from actually losing at least.

[Retropunch]

All great ideas, I'm having a look into them.

The kittens game is pretty awesome - definitely the best of the incremental games I've played.

[Folly]

Critter Mound and Sharkpocalypse serve as adequate alternatives to Kittens Game, imo.

[Shadowgandor]

Although I might sound like an ad on Facebook or Youtube, I found Naruto Online to be a ton of fun for this purpose. It's basically a turn based rpg where you set up teams of 4 ninjas that all have different strengths and combo potential. New features are steadily getting introduced to you as you level and as a F2P game, it's pretty decent although I have to admit that high ranked people have to have spent some money on it. Oh and you can automate the fights and "Sweep" instances you've already done, reducing the amount of repetitiveness without losing out on anything

[frobird]

I use Nationstates and sometimes Runescape

[Starver]

If you do go for NationStates, the base gameplay consists of four interactions (policy decisions) a day, although that can be configurably throttled down (or let stand, waiting to be dealt with), e.g. to exclude weekends.  Hardly onerous. And you make your own aims. (I made it a point to traverse through every single Government Type, which took a while to do.)

Above that, and table-placing efforts that take no more effort, but far more time to accomplish, there are PvPish games of Raiding/Defending regions, but the effort-to-results ratio never appealed to me, and generally I kept out of those affairs.

And the internal United Nations World Authority pseudo-player-led politicing, if you care for that, but it's not obligatory to do that, either.

Then there's an entire forum system, within which you can participate in freeform (with agreed justifications!) roleplay of your nation, and of course entire voluble "General" discussions and forum games that have little to do with the game itself.  You could find as much entertainment there as the Bay12 lower forums. But it has also been a bit heavy on the arguments, at times. Good job that is optional, too.

And also, around 1st April (and Halloween) the site mods tend to roll out something 'special', overlaid upon the base game. Either getbin therevquick so that you're not having to ldarn both baseline and transient gameplays, at the same time, or wait until a week or two after whichever event has just happened so that you miss all but the after-effects of discussion about the seasonal quirks that have just happened!


IOW: It can be a low-intensity playing experience (less than you seem to want) or take over your entire online life, or anywhere in-between. Try to find your own level!

[Mephansteras]

You could always try a game like Earthtongue. You can play with it as much as you want, then leave it running and the world will keep evolving. Then you can check in whenever you have a few minutes and see how it looks, make changes, etc.

If you hadn't suggested that, I was going to.


What about a game like CKII in Observation mode? Let history unfold and periodically check in to see how things are going?

[Parsely]

PTW

[Starver]

PTW

...which is the best Background Game of all! Multiplayer. Sandbox world. Community created updates. And, above all, you need spend only minimum effort!

[Shadowlord]

I'll second SimCity classic and 2000, and openttd.

[Zireael]

PTW.

[George_Chickens]

Sim Life and Sim Earth are great background games, if I remember right. Basically most things with Sim in it will do.