tl;dr; "luck" based procedurally generated civilization stories with your influence on their actions.

The storytelling is nice. It's not gonna take much for you to beat this game. This game tells you the story of (many) civilizations that may or may not get destroyed.. by luck. Meteors, comets, volcanoes, even a forest fire can shut down whatever you've built. No, there's probably no way around it, the game is based around the feature of seeing civilizations rise and fall, and you're just guiding them through, not actually making all decisions for them. If you leave this on idle and come back, you might have some nice stories to read.. or if you play actively, you can make some decisions that may or may not just save them. Either way, you're gonna have fun if you like reading novels and investing yourself into these procedurally generated civs.

9/10 would try again some other time