> Does anyone know a good empire building game that doesn't have this problem?

Stellaris, lets you put colonies on autopilot. It's ripe with other problems, but handling late game scale isn't an issue unless you like to hyper optimize.

I've been trying Stellaris for a bit but it's very slow paced. It feels like theres no tension of any kind at least in the first 1-2h of a game.

You can tweak the settings on the galaxy size or whatever to make things smaller, or at least closer together

If you are willing to stretch beyond "Empire Building", I find Prison Architect amazing.

The PC version is the best, but there are Console Versions (even Switch), and IOS versions that have about 80% of the game.

I admit my thinking might be effected by quarantine but Prison Architect scratched my strategy simulator itch in a way CIV used to and hasn't for the last couple years.

It's way more contained, and more supportive of fun play sessions that are sub 30 minutes which is all I can squeeze in now.

Oh, I've seen a few videos of that. Does look interesting.

It's a bit of an unsolvable tension. Too little to do per city and the early game where you have few cities is boring, too much per city and the lategame is overwhelming. Add a way to delegate tasks to AI, and the question arises of why those tasks are in the game at all if you lose nothing by automating them. And if you discourage wide play (which is my main complaint of the prior game, Civ 5) then you're barely interacting with the broader world at all, and the rest of the map seems pointless.

Try Stellaris, it is also a grand strategy game about empire building and diplomacy and wars... etc but I love the part that it is all real time, no turn base. And even better: I can pause the game and make a lot of commands, then unpause to see it runs. And able to increase or decrease the game speed.

And this game is on sale on steam very often. It was free last week though.

There isn't really a win condition in Stellaris though, just survive the end-game crisis.

The most recent update to Stellaris (with admin offices) makes going wide the strongest strategy to do this by far. Still fun though.

You can win with few cities. I’ve won with one city on emperor difficulty, and regularly win on immortal with less than 6 cities. It’s harder, but doable. You can also do smaller maps, or island maps where space is too limited to have tons of cities.

Civ 1 & 2 also had this problem. Civ's 3, 4 & 5 added some mechanisms to discourage a wide play style. Civ 6 has some of these mechanisms but they aren't as effective as they previously were.

I mean, the Civ franchise is the golden example of the 4X genre: Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate

That said, if you're going for cultural or science victories, tall is still the way to go.

don't play total war.

try Settlers, maybe Age of Wonders? though both are fairly different from Civ and Total War

Civ IV!