>>2067256 (OP)Pie's Ancient Europe is an impressive mod for civ4 with some incredible flavor and mechanics. The warfare is mostly still just "get all the bombardment and fuck off", the challenge lies in supplying your armies and territories. The games run long and earth maps leave you with some insane historical tasks like legitimately importing horse husbandry to Europe from Asia where other games would streamline it for you.
Civ4col has mods to make it less fucking dumb and barren if you're into that. We The People is the most recent meme but it's kinda bloated, I think The Authentic Colonization has a good balance. Juggle guys between towns, build supply chains, sell guns to natives and watch them obliterate the french, all the good stuff.
Shadow Empire is a wargame/4x that chose to replace some of the "beeline for this tech now" gameplay clicking with "allocate money correctly and play the hand you're given by random development and events" gameplay clicking which makes game-to-game strategy somehow more interesting. It does other stuff to this end too, mostly to do with map generation like atmosphere (physics).
Endless Legend is an asymmetric-fantasy-on-ground 4x. It's less mechanically impressive but very flavorful, I wouldn't want to spoil anything here. I think asymmetric warfare is interesting in itself though.
