*Planet Managment*

When even the Countries and Empires start to look small: There's Planet Management.

Planet Management, as the name suggests, tasks you with running an entire planet. The most obvious one is Sim Earth, but there are plenty of others, and some games from other genres could be listed as Planet Management games in their late stages.

The thing about Planet Management is it's kind of niche market, most games ether only get up to the planetary scale right before you would win the game, or only stay at the planetary scale right at the beginning before heading out into interplanetary or (more typically,) interstellar scopes. Games that start and remain at an entire world as their canvas are few and far between, but, they do happen. Slightly more common are games which have a distinct stage where you manage a single planet for a significant segment of the game, then move on to a larger canvas after completing this part of the narrative, (though this author cannot think of a real-world example of this off the top of his head,) or games where you manage not one planet, precisely, but one planet AT A TIME, being promoted through a series of ever-tougher managerial posts within an interstellar empire or federation, with your eye perhaps on the Navy acclaiming you Emperor or being elected Prime-Minister, or even just becoming the Governor of the new sector you've carved out of a lawless section of border stars over the course of the game...

However, the only concrete example of a Planet Management game this author knows of is Sim Earth, in which you guide and control the development of a simulated planet from its earliest days of heavy volcanism, to the era of its technological civilizations abandoning it to sail the stars, which is the closest thing to a win condition the game has.

This is largely overlooked territory in the game design market, so most of the games you find here will be Flights-of-Fancy (F.o.F.) games made up by the people writing them: until some enterprising programmer convinces them to partner with him/her to turn that story into a real game...