Master of Orion 1 or 2 are good choices.
They're also easy as hell. The problem with them nowadays is that I find it almost impossible to lose at Moo II unless I were to use bad ship design and combat tactics. I even won a game where I never colonized more than my home solar system.
I'd suggest Sword of the Stars, but if you actually WANT micromanagement, it might not have enough. It (with expansions) is great, but removes a lot of the micromanagement that you'd find in other games - planet management is similar to what you did in Moo I in terms of complexity, rather than Moo II (terraforming and infrastructure sliders to determine how much to put into those, instead of buildings on planets you've colonized, which is good, because in Moo II that always bugged me - after the 10th planet, why do I need to build 30 buildings on another planet again just to make it able to do anything? And then once you finish terraforming and infrastructure you end up deciding how much to allocate to trade for each planet instead of construction, whether to overharvest resources (permanently depletes them), etc). You're spending most of your time managing your ships instead of your planets, and ship construction is very fast at your homeworld and other similarly developed and resource-heavy worlds, so much so that you can make half a dozen ships per turn or so in the beginning to use as scouts - what limits you is that building them (and developing new colonies, and doing research, etc) costs money, and you have to get that money through taxes or trade.
Ship design and research is very detailed, and SOTS has tactical combat, unlike GalCiv II, and the research is actually important.
I've played GalCiv II (before I played SOTS, actually), and pretty much hated it, but some people like it.
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Topic: Good 4x games that are manageable/ (Read 7443 times)