I can play the game, and I can beat the AI, I just do not understand what amplitude wants you to do in this game besides war. The good news is that war is relativly fun, until the end game when the winner of the game is set and you are just map painting moving too many units.

The bad news is that, besides the early game, there is not really anything to do besides fight wars. in terms of peaceful mechanics there is religion and influence sphere, which are both very passive mechanics, the most interesting thing about religion is picking tenants and you only do that 4 times a game, passive influence sphere is, well, passive. Both of these mechanics biggest impact on the game, beyond religion sometimes giving some pretty good fids at the beginning, is giving you grievances to go to war.

Besides these, there are civics, which are analogous to civilizations social policies, endless legend's empire plans, and endless space 2's law system. Except even after the change to a number of them, after ancient era the vast majority have negligible  impact on the game, cost too much, and in any case aren't interesting. They don't promote alternate styles of play like ES2 laws or civ social policies, so again, they are not that fun to interact with.

Theres also diplomacy, which is sorta neat, its simple, trade is simple, grievances I honestly like as a system. But trade is also boring. You want to trade for everything, because its investing money to not only get a FIDS buff and a stability buff, but also more money. Bit of a no brainier not to trade. Granted I guess maybe if the system was more visible, you could sanction AIs, but you cant see what they are trading with other people so imo there is not really any reason not to trade with every AI. The unfortunate thing about trade is once all luxuries are improved, you can just trade for all of them, and then if you are playing a peaceful game, there is nothing else to do trade wise for the rest of the game.

So you get to the point where you finished your last religious tenant ages ago, you are already trading with every AI, you got all the civics you want, what are you supposed to do. just keep placing districts? I don't understand what amplitude wants me to do, the game just grinds to a halt, and this is in early modern era. Maybe this is just me. Do any of y'all have fun with peaceful games in the mid to late game? I just get bored and look at my new EUs and decided to try them out and then get into a war that has so many unit on each side that its a chore to prosecute, and that I don't even want to win because it would be more cities to administer.

I hear you Blackwell.

The graphics are beautiful so you can spend time looking at your cities and the geography.

Anyway, the devs want us to gain fame and finish the game. But I've always thought their ending timeframe comes too soon - it seems like they want us to finish a game in 2-4 hours. I want to "stop and smell the roses." This game is enjoyable and would be more enjoyable if there were more things to do in each era, instead of rushing to the next era then rushing to finish the game.

Every playthrough is a story for me. You can choose to be aggressive or not and play with different combinations. Trying to find some specific overpower culture combination with wonders is always fun.

The main gameplay, as with civilization and similar games, is building up your city/economy. In essence, the game is a race, military is when two of the racers get into a fistfight. In general this game doesn't want you to do war, mechanics like sieges being impossible (there is no real reason not to almost always sortie) strategic resources being hugely restrictive about what units you get because you need 2-3 of each, troops costing population, grievances not turning into demands in wars etc. The game encourages a peaceful playstyle and actively discourages violence. The game's main gameplay is building districts and exploring different city layouts, combinations of civics, religions, etc to make big numbers.

The main reason playing a a Pacifist game is very very hard to win, especially on humankind, is that you essentially are saying ok, I'm not gonna get any militarist stars, and im going to have very little expansionist stars the entire game. This would be hard but doable (I mean technically it's doable now, I've one a pacifist game on humankind and basically I think you have to get lucky with how the game develops and your starting region) but unfortunately the way builder and pop stars are calculated means that annexing other cities boosts those counts too. Doesn't matter if you grew the population or built the districts. SO war actually gets you closer to those stars as well. Add on top of the the food formula (the more pop in a city the more each pop consumes) and the fact that districts/infrastructure/luxuries provide the vast majority of fids in a city and not jobs, the best way to get more population is to counterintuitively depopulate the cities so they grow faster by building units. Even in a peaceful game it makes sense to invest in army because it helps get pop stars. And if you are investing in army you might as well use it. And yea, civics, influence, religion, all underdeveloped, and the most interesting thing about all three, is that they give grievances. So you can go to war. Everything comes back to war.

War is really good in HK, just like you said. Amplitude should dramatically rebalance how era stars are earned because as it stands now, it's not difficult to achieve 3/4th of them without hardly trying; most of them all feed into each other and the gameplay becomes monotonous and uninteresting.