played Elite for a little bit, maybe a month or two, before it got to the point where it just felt like a job

Yeah, it never really clicked for me, and I didn't like the "faux online" aspect either. I bet that it's probably pretty in VR, though.

I love the X series. I have hundreds of hours in X4. It's definitely my favorite of the bunch.

Ah, okay, I didn't think that that'd be your cup of tea, because while the game does have fighters, it tends to favor large ship combat, and my take is that the dogfighting isn't too elaborate -- like, if you can leverage strafing in X2, the enemy AI isn't all that great at predicting where you'll be. There isn't, I don't know, breaking missile locks or whatever. Though I guess that exploiting dead zones in fields of fire is a thing. And there's a management focus, and the ability to indirectly manage many ships. I hadn't played much of X4 myself, though I did do X3 a fair bit.

Do you enjoy the fleet command aspect of it? There's a game that I recall that felt more like a fleet naval combat simulator in space, not on the first-person dogfighting aspect. Lots of naval warfare-ish jargon, focus on sensor and counter-sensor stuff -- I suspect that people who like something leaning a bit more milsim would like that. It was early access when I played it, but probably enough to have some fun with it. Let me find the name.

googles

Got it. NEBULOUS: Fleet Command.

They flash through a lot of functionality in a few seconds quickly in the demo vids there on steam, but you can see the ship and weapon configuration, fleet and ship commands, system-specific damage control, some of the electronic warfare stuff, things like that.

So, I enjoyed what was there, but I can imagine someone finding the faux-naval jargon a bit opaque. Sort of like operating a naval group, with ships with specialized roles. The graphics are okay, but beauty isn't their goal -- they're trying to do a combat environment in space.

I actually ran across it when looking for a non-space milsim fleet naval combat game, and was pleasantly-surprised.

I'm not big on the multplayer aspect

Yeah, ditto.

Starfield was a huge disappointment

I liked it, but then I wanted a Skyrim or Fallout 4 out of it, not a space combat game. Yeah, the space combat there isn't much more than a pretty minigame.