Games

I play it in that async multiplayer they support with friends, both against each other and semi-allied with bots.

It's cool. I love the variety, I love how that works against the sameyness these games usually develop, and it has just enough techncial qualities like pretty graphics and okay netcode to never get in my way. Plus hey, async MP! Always a huge plus to me, and sadly way too rare overall.

I can see it become boring if one players singleplayer generated maps religiously, but I got Against The Storm to scratch that itch, personally.

As far as the gameplay goes, it's mostly the usual 4X fare, of course. Differences, if you're not used to Age of Wonders games:

• Magic is strong, to put it mildly. The games take their inspiration from the old Master of Magic game after all, and as such leader-cast spells can wildly swing battles even when your units are outnumbered and outteched. Likewise, strong summoned units and stacked buff spells make terrifying army stacks even out of tier 1 units (in fact there's a spell tome specifically for that!).
• The way you learn more magic makes for a nice little variety. You get 3 spells offered to research, you can reroll but it's costly. Every few researched spells you get to pick a new tome of spells from which to research, and every few tomes you get to advance a tier and pick higher-level spell tomes.
• From tomes + some other effects you have to "unlock" certain empire upgrades, and unlike other games some of these upgrades are instead instant effects, so at the right time they could swing things wildly (like healing all your units on the entire map to full).
• There's less focus on building your own empire - as you can only have 3-5 cities max anyways - and more on each city expanding in a huge sprawling network of influence and vassalizing more cities you take over, then getting tribute from them and hiring units with a resource specifically for that + empire upgrades.
• Random encounters and events with decisions are way more common than in other such games. They're not terrible meaningful 90%+ of the time (though cool ones do exist!), but it's neat to get something shown so often, and sometimes you have replies that are unlocked by your specific empire attributes and setups.
• The race/faction creator is something I've not seen that way since Master of Orion 2, not even when Endless Space 2 tried to go wild with that with later patches.