Man, I've spent a decent amount of time with Stellaris' Le Guin update and I'm loving it. The changes to how population works had a much grander effect than I anticipated. Because now planets actually go through stages--they start off as lowly, useless colonies, graduate to rural worlds without a specialisation, and later on the new building mechanics encourage you to specialise it in some way. And the best part is, the game recognises this and gives them a flavourful label with a slight bonus for that specialisation.
And the pop changes are genius. On top of working more elegantly in terms of mechanics, they're hella flavourful, too. You'll have core worlds with highly stratified populations (so a large amount of specialists and leaders, few workers) and other worlds with huge worker populations. But as they progress and specialise, the advanced jobs will lift pops into a higher strata (workers for raw materials, specialists for resources). It makes everything so much more elegant and logical.
Overall, it has made the infrastructure/pop game of Stellaris into a game of its own. It's much more intuitive and engaging compared to the almost set-and-forget system pre-Le Guin used.
Stellaris is truly the best it's ever been, and feels like a whole new game, now. Highly recommand it.
Warlock: Master of the Arcane is the first one that jumps to mind. What I saw of Gladius reminded me of it
a lot. It's like Civ5 if it was purely combat. Heard some bad stuff about Warlock 2, but never played it for myself, unfortunately.
You might also like Age of Wonders 3 a lot, if you're into its turn-based combat. Conquest is the name of the game.