It doesn’t quite have everything you were asking for but you might like Space Haven. No cats, but you’re trying to keep your small group of spacefarers alive and your spaceship afloat. A lot of the game is resource management, managing faction relations, and doing small scale tactics as you fight against aliens, robots, and raiders. It has some of the small scale control over your spacefarers similar to Sims, but allows you the freedom to be a group of roaming mercenaries, set up your own little outpost on an asteroid to offer services, or raid everyone in sight.

It’s still in early access, but it has fairly active development with several updates having been pushed out this month alone.