Whats the best 4x game for Multiplayer?

I have played quite a few 4x Games over the last years. I personally play them 90% of the time on multiplayer with my friends. I wanted to know what you think the best 4x games for private multiplayer sessions are.

I will list the ones I tried and give my reasons as to why I think those would be good or bad choices. But those are only my Opinions so feel free to disagree and share your point of few on those and other games :)

Civilization V and VI - Lets get the obvious one out of the way. Many People know and already have them. Which is good, but led to real big differences in the skills from our group. It often has real problems getting a game or a save state startet. We often need one hour before its really starting.
The Battles can be really awful, simultaneous turns are a must and then the battles are often extremely stressful and come down to who has the best internet concection or can click the fastest.
The Civilizations are very similar which makes it a rather fair experience (atleast on the surface) and easier to teach newer Players.

Endless Space 2 & Endless Legends - Very different factions which are a lot more fun in multiplayer in my opinion. The market can make things also quite interesting. Battles work better IMO as they are not a competition on who clicks faster (atleast not as much as in civ). However the games tend to desynchronize. Are more difficult to teach because of more different factions and less people know those games so its more difficult to get someone to play them. Very nice DLC policy, if the host has a DLC everyone can play with it. It can feel more unfair because of the more different factions.

Stellaris - Have only played it a bit in Multiplayer, because we weren't able to restart our save file. We more or less figured it out afterwards but it wasn't such an easy fix, and this in itself is a big downside.
Seems like the most "fun" game as in: you shouldn't take it too seriously and should do crazy stuff, as it seems to me that in this game there is also the most crazy things that can happen. The random Story Quests seem very fun, however difficult to really read if you are in a larger group, because you can't really pause if you play with too many people or the game will take forever.

Some games I think would be interesting: Old world, Age of Wonders 4, Civ VII in the future, Ara History Untold, Songs of Conquest.

Edit: We are usually playing against each other and never really co-op. Diplomacy is a part of the game and alliances might be formed but never before the game starts and you never know if they will last.