Also EL and Civ player here. The game is faster than those two, with a heavy emphasis on combat and unit customization, and lighter on the city building.
Combat takes place on different maps depending on the tile of the world map and not the world map itself, and there's a very diverse set of units for each player. You can also modify units with up to three "mods" that enhance attacks or give your units new passive or active abilities. There's various damage types for different purposes, a multitude of unit types (biological, cyborgs, mechanical, etc.), buffs and debuffs, and unit modifiers.
The setting is kind of hard sci-fi and has very good lore, and each player picks a faction or race and a secret technology that modifies some of the tech tree and has its own units, mods and operations. There's also NPC factions (kind of like EL villages) that you can get more units and mods from for a huge amount of diversity as the game progresses.
There's two tech trees, with one for economics, and the other for everything military, units and mods and operations (like spells that can be used on the world map or in combat).
Finally, the game is focused on combat but there's different victory types besides conquest, tough most will involve fighting. There's a technology victory that involves buildings and operations, and a peace victory involving getting a good reputation and good relations with NPC factions by doing quests (usually fighting an army or dedicating some research or production), and other victory types but I've never tried them.
.png){kind=avatar}
