It's so awesome I have no idea what I'm doing but it's so great. Making your own faction and ruler by mixing matching stuff is something I've always wanted from similar games like Total War. It's good enough that I can take my tabletop characters into a wargaming leadership role with this game. In the base game you can be any of the typical fantasy races like orcs, dwarves, humans, elves, etc. Then you can throw on some other cultural/social traits on that steer your faction into favoring swarm-style combat, magical research, dark magic, corpse-cannibalism, list goes on. This is mainly what I meant when I said I had no idea what I was doing, as there's a lot of options here and it's easy to make an unsatisfying faction as a new player.
The UI was kind of unintuitive to me at first but after an hour or so things were fine. Combat is turn-based on hex-tiled maps with chance to hit mechanics. So you can miss and status effects may be resisted. If you don't like RNG combat this might not be for you.
I like the city-building aspect the least. It was difficult for me to see the point in the various resources and how they contributed but maybe I just need to look at more tutorial stuff. Some buildings boost others so there's definitely a priority to follow. I won't give it too much flak since city-building is my least favorite part of any strategy game.
The exploration is fine, being able to go underground too me off-guard and was awesome. Being able to sail and explore the ocean was also cool. It doesn't feel as good to me as in similar games like HoMM3 or Songs of Conquest but it really is just the "feel" of it, I have no mechanical complaints about it.
I've never been big on spells in these sorts of games but I have been using them much more in this than any other game. Buff and debuff spells have effects that feel very impactful. Some damage spells feel great too but I would say they sometimes fell a little short on power to me.
