There are two games I am suddenly trying to remember, any help would be greatly appreciated. They are both persistent multiplayer RTS games of a sort.
First game: This is a vaguely japanese-ey sci fi game. It had various factions (circa five-ish) which you could spawn in as a member of. You would start out as your own small star empire, and you and many other such empires would work to further your own sides goals. You could build spacecraft to colonize worlds, develop tech, harvest resources, and build big spaceships to try to fight the other empires for resources and land. You would have a small 'home sector' of planets that nobody but you could gain access to, giving you a small area to yourself that the other empires couldn't take from you. This also meant that each faction had a certain minimum degree of industrial capacity available to them. I vaguely recall that at one point the blue faction was pushed into a tiny corner and was almost totally dependent on these mini regions in order to hold onto any of their planets at all. At some point after that, there was a reset, where the empires got to keep any planets they took in their home regions, so us (the pink guys) launched a huge offensive on the guys to the east of us, hugely overextended, them gobbled up a bunch of their land on the reset before they could push us back. Funnily enough the reset happened later than expected, but we were actually having fairly good success at holding the land regardless. There was some implication that probably our side could have done that all along and gotten away with it.
It had a big map of planets connected by little hyperlane things, with various large regions connected by choke points. Bashing your way through a chokepoint was generally a pretty strategically significant thing that could end a months-long stalemate.
The actual ship combat I only vaguely remember. I seem to recall there were 'tiers' of ship stacks that would shoot at eachother over fairly prolonged periods of time.
One of the distinctive visual features is that it had a client which had 3d spaceships shooting eachother for its main menu screen, but all of the actual game was basically 2d sprite graphics. I was never a huge contributor to the side I was playing with, but I still fairly fondly remember it, even if only vaguely.
Second Game: This one is a lot more obscure, its basically a conventional RTS game (you build a factory, you build resource extractors, you fabricate units and tech up). Main unique factor is its quite persistent. It was always a fairly low population game, and it had this one player who was just this absolute world spanning hegemony. You would always spawn in in your own tiny corner of the map, build up units, and then vaguely struggle to try to take resource points from him without drawing his ire. It was hated by many people because of this OP individual, but I always found it to be pretty enjoyable every time I tried it out because of how brutally asymmetrical it was. Particularly the fact that there were always a few players around having long term success in escaping this guys notice. I never succeeded at that myself but kindof wanted to at least check if anyone remembered the name. I think it had 'planet' in the name maybe.
e: If it helps, I most likely heard of both of these games through this board.