CoE is a peculiar strategy game. There is not much strategy to it. All the little moving parts are quite simple. Paint villages your color to collect money/ore/unique resource for your faction, spend that resource to buy units (Many playable classes have more efficient engines to get troops through other actions, so it is not always a shop menu but in spirit it is still throw money to make troops), then move that stack of troops around to paint more of the map and throw it at other people's stacks. There is no tactical layer to the combat. It is all automatic. Commanders only get 3 moves per turn and most terrain eats up multiple points so on a good day you're moving three armies two squares each per turn. No building, no fortifying, nothing of classic Civ. Everything is boiled down to extreme simplicity.
The monkey wrench in the works is that the map is ABSOLUTELY PACKED with neutral enemies that keep you from getting too far too fast. They spawn constantly and, as all maps are randomly generated, can easily spawn in ways that you get wiped out 3 turns into the game. It is very rare that they won't destroy at least one AI faction in the first two dozen turns of the game.
While every faction having their own slightly different engine is fairly interesting, the most compelling part of CoE is dealing with the complete brutality of the neutral spawns in this game. Neutrals will wander around aimlessly and randomly camp outside your capital for 30 turns before stealing it to instantly end your game if you did not leave a defensive force to stop them. These horrific hellbeasts will flit about and keep stealing all those nice income generating outposts you captured 4 turns back because you simply cannot afford to have a fighting force dropped at every single town. Even the character whose gimmick is being able to round up a militia at each town can barely produce more than a few speedbumps. These freaks ravage you and the AI equally so much that the main objective of the game is just "Die last."
"Die last" is pretty accurate, considering one faction can literally start the apocalypse (You can still win while this awful planet is going full apocalypse as long as that apocalypse wrecks all the other guys first). Many factions have cute ways of interacting with the world, and there is quite a lot of it to work with. There are several other planes of existence in this game inhabited by even more frightful monsters. Demons, celestials, undead, they even got some cthulu crap hiding around out there, complete with occasional random events that bring this crap to the main world. You gotta have the tism pretty bad to appreciate this though, as it sounds like the stuff of a cool roguelike adventure game but you're still playing a troop stacking tile moving strategy game so most of the other planes are either penalty boxes for getting screwed by RNG or the one place that one faction draws their cheap troop engine from. So much of it is orthogonal to the objectives of "Die last" that you may just want to ignore the objectives and play around with the various interactions. There is a gate to the demon realm so why not conquer IT too? (Elysium is such an awful place it cannot really be made worse by annexing hell.) Sure none of the other players are there and the resources there are not worth it but who cares?! Until the randoms kill the last player and the game ends.
The game typically plays to completion in about 1.5-2 hours, at least against AI. The AI is not particularly smart but since so much of the game is playing against the neutral monsters, they do not have to be. It is simple, quick, random, but has a lot of unique engines to try to crank and a lot of world interactions that can distract you from the core map painting army stack shuffling game... or even just randomly wipe out your best commander and biggest army instantly. But the core mechanics are all simple and quick enough that you could come back to a saved game a month later and not miss a beat. It is a very beer and pretzels sort of strategy game that has a lot of different little toys and engines and interactions to play with and explore even if the component gameplay parts and strategy remains fairly simple.
Plus there is workshop support and an active modding community so if you want to see the PVP or PVE expanded upon, you have options.
