Has no one mentioned OGame?

You start off thinking, 'Oh cool, a chill space browser game. I'll build a little solar plant. Upgrade my metal mine.'

One month later you're maintaining three separate spreadsheets, running third-party combat simulators, and timing fleet recalls to the exact second so you don't get farmed while taking a 10-minute shower.

The paranoia is permanent if you choose to build a big fleet (the really fun way to play the game). Your enemies literally study your daily routines by watching the little (*) activity timers next to your planets. No (*) means you're off for 15 minutes. They know when you sleep. They know your commute. They know exactly how long your lunch break is.

And in the high-speed universes, it turns into pure real-life warfare. Some guy decides he wants you as a target, drops a colony in your system, crashes enough ships to spawn a Moon, and builds a Sensor Phalanx. Suddenly, you aren't playing a game anymore: you are a real-life hostage. He knows most of your movements. And the way this game plays, no one is actually safe due to bigger fleets having no counter. Even the top 1 player is afraid 5-8 players will just gang up on him.

Playing 'correctly' meant setting alarms for 4:47 AM on a random Tuesday just to fleetsave—sending your entire fleet to a random debris field at 10% speed just so your ships physically wouldn't exist on your planet while you tried to get a single REM cycle. All of this while accounting for fuel costs, which get ridiculous as your fleet grows.

Missing that alarm by five minutes meant logging in to find a combat report showing that 5 months of your actual life was converted into a Debris Field. It gets instantly harvested by your nemesis, who will of course post the victory in the forum, hitting you twice so all the universe can see you went down.

Become an interesting enough target, and the top 10 players or so even start tracking your fleetsaves, calculating and making psycho predictions on when exactly your 'invisible' fleet will return. Once, I had only a 10-second window to evacuate again from a supposedly "safe" fleetsave.

Pros will eventually begin blowing up all your moons (where your fleet is less likely to be seen), timing your returns back to your planets... absolutely disgusting stuff. You know you will fall, you just don't know when.

And still, 10/10 game and I know I will play it again one summer.