Yeah, while Distant Worlds is definitely top-of-the-shelf 4X, it just keeps making me want to play Aurora instead. DW doesn't quite get the granularity I want for either ship design or tactical control (though in both cases it's better than most of the competition), and the automation feels pretty much mandatory because anything beyond a very basic empire would require ungodly amounts of the uninteresting sort of micromanagement. Also another notch in my case for turn-based 4X over realtime with pause: turns give you coherent chunks of choices to make rather than a continual stream. Even mostly automated as DW can be, RTWP feels like turn based where you have to manually end each turn, and bad things can happen if you don't do so quickly enough.
The ship designer is pretty cool (I especially like being able to choose sprite and sprite scaling by class), but again the granularity is wanting. One of the things I love most about Aurora is being able to design ships right down to the specs of each component rather than having a plug-and-play thing with preset components a la pretty much every other space 4X ever.
The only major complaint I have about DW is that the event log is fucking anemic. Another reason why I love Aurora: you get a fairly detailed breakdown of everything of note. I get what the devs were going for with DW's design, putting the player into a more realistic leadership role where you can't efficiently micromanage much of anything, but I despise the loss of control.
That said, I don't think Aurora would do any better on that scale, but it does kinda drive home why Aurora grips me in the way no other 4X does: in Aurora, the most exciting part of the game (the initial "bursting out" where you're leaving your home system to explore, colonize, and fight over unknown space) is the game. In pretty much every other 4X ever made, you get that initial phase of fun for maybe an hour or two, tops, then everything sort of stabilizes and turns into more of a management sim that occasionally allows you to smash fleets into each other like a toddler with a couple action figures.
DW definitely has a different approach to things than a lot of 4X games, and arguably a better one, but it still runs into that brick wall of spending an hour setting tax policy and designating planetary construction projects for every minute of combat.
Worth a buy at $15, and a better 4X than Stellaris, GalCiv, &c., but Aurora is still king, both in keeping the focus on the most interesting phase of empire development and in providing tactical control that feels like commanding real spaceships rather than clicking a stack of numbers onto another stack of numbers.
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