Hey, I know this is a weird request, but despite all it's flaws I still enjoyed ME:A and it made me realize something:

I love the concept of colonizing new worlds.

Does anyone know about any other games that have a heavy focus on this? The only example I can think of off the top of my head is Civ Beyond Earth.

Stellaris.

The early game is all about discovering and colonising planets. Certain planets will even have random events and encounters to manage. It is a game about managing a Star empire so it's maybe not as zoomed in as Beyond Earth but if you don't mind a little more abstracted it's a great

No Man's Sky if you're more about exploring and discovering new worlds, not so much colonizing them. Flawed as it still is I still think there's a sort of mystery and grandeur about it. Sorry if that's not exactly helpful but all I can think of now as well.

Rimworld may fit the bill too, though that's kind of hardcore and more about survival against the odds and emergent gameplay/stories.

Haven't played it at all personally (blasphemy!), but since you mentioned Beyond Earth maybe you should try Alpha Centauri.

I suppose any space 4x game technically works, but that may be a little too general.

@relenus: In the same vein as Stellaris and Beyond Earth, the Endless Space games do this pretty well. I actually tried out the original Endless Space just on the basis of this screen and knowing you can terraform planets.

The first thing that came to mind is Sins of a Solar Empire, although that's at a pretty abstracted level.

Yep, Stellaris. I love Sci-fi and the universe and I just love Stellaris. The randomness in it is so wonderful, so many great stories and unique playthroughs can happen, especially if you role-play. 260 hours so far and I can see myself playing more. Very customizable. It's an easy game to understand but also deep enough for the more hardcore crowd.

Also No Man's Sky is actually a very good game after all the updates. I've probably put in 200 hours and I loved it.

The original Civ in space, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (much, much better than Beyond Earth, and I see it's now on sale on GoG at 1,69€)

Alpha Cenaturi and Stellaris are both fantastic games, though they are strategy games, so the experience is much higher-level than ME:A's on-the-ground stuff.

Offworld Trading Company is a city/colony-building game, so it's also high-level. But you're only dealing with one colony, so you get more into the nitty gritty.

Starbound has you as one person, so you really get into experience of seeing the unknown; but its mostly about the exploration and crafting. Less-so the colony development.

Rimworld is kinda sorta that, it's also a fantastic Dwarf Fortress inspired management game, highly recommended.

Stellaris, endless space 2 , master of orion and galactic civ 3.

Basically the entire traditional 4X genre is about that (the term originally only meant Master of Orion style space colonization games, not the likes of Empire or Sid Meier's Civilization which have retroactively become part of it).

Master of Orion, Endless Space, Sins of A Solar Empire, Galactic Civilizations, Distant Worlds, Star Ruler and Stellaris stick pretty close to the traditional formula in which colonization primarily is your means to increase production or research rates in order to defeat other civilizations.

Anno 2205, Aven Colony and Startopia deal with more city/colony management stuff in the vein of Sim City or The Settlers with little or no combat.

There are a few space flight/combat/trading sims with some colony building aspects too, where I think the Evochron games (especially Evochron Legacy) probably have the most fleshed out mechanics, but No Man's Sky has gotten more and more of it with recent updates too, and the X series (with X: Rebirth beging the most recent) have some space station and fleet building aspects.

There is an old Spore prototype called Space all about terraforming planets and colonizing them (also Spore does this too)
http://www.spore.com/comm/prototypes

I also second Stellaris, as while it is less science-y about terraforming and whatnot, it takes a more (but incredibly simple) sociological view of colonies and space empires.

To paraphrase Manveir Heir: you colonialist monster.

I do not understand why people are saying Stellaris and No Man's Sky are good examples of games that do the colonizing of other planets well. Stellaris, Galactic Civilizations, Endless Space and other space 4X are good games, but colonizing planets in them are simple affairs: clicking on a colony ship towards a destination, then click a few more buttons to terraform that planet if you want. This simplification is understandable, since these games focus on building star-spanning empires and not colonizing planets specifically. No Man's Sky has no colonization to speak of, with every base that you can "construct" already being there. Building that base doesn't change depending on the planet, and characterized by the same repetitive, bland mechanics that plague No Man's Sky.

The only game that really captures colonizing an alien planet superbly is Alpha Centauri. Anyone who hasn't played the game will probably see how it looks like and think "Hey, it's Civilization in space". This is extremely inaccurate, of course. Alpha Centauri succeeds as the best planetary colonization game because of three mechanics-driven elements:

1) The alien planet you are colonizing feels aptly alien because of unique mechanics tied to how you build and expand. Winds on the planet always move from east to west, which makes rainfall more beneficial in areas west of elevated terrain. You can literally affect this unique characteristic of the alien planet by terraforming your territory to raise the land such that your bases are located west of that elevation. The alien organism in Planet also feels appropriately alien, because they operate on different mechanics in terms of combat. The mindworms (think Civilization's barbarians) do not care about attack and defense values of human units. Instead, they look at the morale of the unit i.e. it's veterancy. This is because mindworms have psionic abilities, and only soldiers with the mental fortitude gained through experience can resist the mindworms' psionic attacks. A faction like The University may have the best guns and armor, but if their soldiers are green rookies, they will still be killed by a few mindworms.

2) The decisions and actions you make in game are affected by the planet's rules, just as colonizing a planet like Mars will have to seriously consider how life there is different from Earth's. In Alpha Centauri, the prominence of alien flaura and fauna will influence which technology paths you will take--having lots of fungus in your territory will most likely lead you to research techs that improve yields from that fungus. The special terrain features that are randomly placed will affect the way that you expand, given that these features offer significant bonuses to bases built next to them.

3) Human society operates differently in an alien planet, and Alpha Centauri's social engineering mechanic (the precursor to the customizable social policies of Civilization games from IV onwards) reflects this aspect of colonization. An entire class of social engineering options is devoted to how your faction will deal with the alien planet's flora and fauna, which in turn affects the society that you build over the course of the game. Moreover, the division of factions into ideological groups makes sense in a game about colonization, since social constructs such as nations will not matter in the harsh demands of surviving in an alien world; however, human beliefs will.

Special mention to Kerbal Space Program as a game that gets colonization right in realistic and scientific ways, especially in the challenges of actually getting your colony to another planet in the first place. However, depth in portraying colonization in KSP is only possible with the great mods that have been made for that game.

Oxygen Not Included - Direct duplicant colonists stranded on an alien world on how to build and explore a colony. Just be sure to provide them enough oxygen...

Nom Nom Galaxy - Colonize new worlds and contruct a factory to sell soup (yes soup!) for an intergalactic trade corp. Be sure to defend your base from corporate attack drones bent on destroying the competition.