A "resource management" game where you are buying upgrades to buy upgrades to buy upgrades.

There's a lot of fairly essential buildings and units unlocked by prestige points. I'd finished the first round a bit annoyed at how the low food cap was actually limiting the size of the army I could throw at enemies. So I unlocked the granary first.

The only stand-out elements of this game are "quests" which follow a pattern of sending scouts to find enemies to fight, which unlocks a research, which unlocks a chance for scouts to find a new encounter to fight to progress the quest. And you're just supposed to remember, I guess, that there's a narrative thread there. A little labeling would really help clarify, because it could be a very long time before RNG and your own progression makes that next step doable.

There's not a lot of choice involved in any of it. The closest being allocating mana to buffs either to combat or to production, and shifting them back and forth with your priorities.

And defeated enemies offer you some ongoing benefit, like storage space, "free" income, or researchables. Which makes the army part of your progression in an interesting fashion, although you can't really predict what you'll get out of it, there aren't really any bad discoveries... mostly.

I did wind up in a war, because of the Barbarian quest chain. We're the bad guys. We literally raid their villages, enslave their people, "export our culture"... and then when the scouts find the last step of the chain, a splash pop-up shows us we've basically pissed off Conan.

At war, there's occasional well-forewarned raids to fend off. And when you fail, you lose all your troops and everything in storage. But you keep the workers and buildings. It might be enough time between raids to properly build up enough defense, or to build up to where your production is good enough to.

But since "Conan" was right to kick our asses, I just kinda stopped there. The gameplay doesn't really evolve any farther, and I don't want to be the bad guys.

The reality is bad enough in my country.

Credit where it's due tho, the game does implement a kind of narrative, and it makes for a very consistent second monitor experience. The economy is balanced enough for this sort of thing, both in terms of production priorities and marketplace exchanges. Technical competence is a good thing, and hard to get the right feel... and when it does gets hard to make progress, you've got the prestige option to make the next run a little better... maybe after finishing that next big project, get one more point to spend. Just one more...