OK does anyone know of a game like I described above? I'm hoping for the following elements:
You control a character who has stats, equipment, etc.
There are NPCs. You can buy, sell, talk etc. with them. You can convince some to join you and lead them, commanding them to do things. They will do stuff for you in your absence. NPCs have needs and will trade with each other and interact independently of you also.
There are natural resources. You and your men can harvest, craft, research.
You can design and build structures, but it takes man-hours and resources and tools and possibly research. Structures can be equipped with furniture that helps the structure (mounted guns for defenders to employ, a forge for melting, a furnace for glassmaking).
There are plenty of other mobs (NPCs, monsters) that will interact with you and your men and your structures and idle items lying around.
There are reasons to stay put and settle (build a trade route, harvest immense resource deposits, farming, build a city) and also to move around (limited renewable resources like water, grass for grazing, seasonal flooding or storms, migration of resource mobs, seasonal rampaging hordes of mobs).
There are NPC settlements that you can trade with and get information from, and otherwise interact with (for example, if you make maps that lead from an overcrowded area to a desirable destination, and distribute them, people will want to try to travel there and will spend money at your waystations you built along the trail. If you find a huge gold deposit and let people know about it they will want to go to that area and look for gold themselves or maybe even work for you).
NPCs band together by faction, factions merge and conflict and trade with each other, so there's a background of cool stuff going on all the time.
I'm imagining a western, but you could do a post-apoc, or planetary colonization sci-fi, lots of different things.
So do you know of anything like that? It could be single-player or multi-player, but it's intensely important - crucial even - that the NPCs are robust enough that the impact of the NPCs is more than the players (although players will probably be pulling the NPCs' strings and influencing them).