The furthest any man made object has reached from Earth is Voyager 1, launched nearly 40 years ago. A quick check on google informs me that it is approximately 18 billion kilometres from Earth. The nearest star, Proxima Centurai, is approximately 40 trillion kilometres from Earth. Claiming we can, nowadays, send an interstellar probe to nearby systems, is like claiming you can cross the Pacific Ocean because you have built a row boat. The fastest man made object is Juno, traveling at 0.00023 c. Somewhat slower than 10% the speed of light! I'm sure there are pie-in-the-sky theories about attaining 0.1c, but claiming we can achieve this, when the fastest we have achieved is nearly a thousand times slower is not reasonable. Now, it is possible we will one day send probes to nearby star systems. But colonising other star systems, like seen in every 4X game? I don't think so. Most stars are a lot further away, and simply not possible to reach in any practical sense, even for unmanned probes. Maybe some form of cryostasis will allow humans to survive for thousands of years to travel to the nearest planet capable of supporting life, and all the other many difficult problems can be solved. However, the cost of doing so would still likely be the worlds GDP for several years, so you have to ask why any civilisation would.
Voyager and Pioneer programs were great for their time. But we should not compare it to technologies potentially available nowdays. Mankind still could not build and send colony ship, but it technically could, like you said spending But we a talking about 4X game with (hopefully) good amount of realism. LIke fuel, ship design, colonization, diplomacy, military operations, planning and so forth There are nice examples like "Children of dead Earth"
Such game would have horrible pacing. You'd spend 100 turns just building scouts and exploring few neighboring stars. That is if you go by If you go by MoO 1 time scale where 1 turn is 1 Earth year. If you go by MoO 2 time scale (where 10 turns = 1 year) a regular MoO 2 game would be over by the time proble leaves a home system in real physics simulatior.
That's ok. But, no one said that for example Civilization has slow pase I think it could be fun to have start from pre-warp age colonize local star system and form the race during the game, rather then selecting like it is done in most cases.
My point is that realism in a 4X game would be awful. You can forget FTL drives and communication. If a system at the edge of your empire is attacked, you won't even know about it for at least 100 years. Reinforcements will take 1000s of years. What kind of game would that be? I want star trek style nonsense sci-fi for a game thankyou very much!. FTL drives, transporters, naval style combat in space, space monsters, etc. A hard sci-fi 4X game would be boring.
