Age of Wonders 4 seems to be tailor made for me! I only played the free trial, so while I won't claim to have a complete grasp on the mechanics yet, I can confidently say that it's much more approachable than the Civ series. While it looks like you're doing the same things on the surface, like building and maintaining cities, raising armies, and progressing through tech trees, theres only one way to win the game: military conquest. So everything you do is pushing you toward waging war on your opponents in one way or another.
The combat is a lot more interesting too. When you start a fight, it takes you to a separate battlefield where you move each of your units individually, similar to X-Com. This can admittedly make a single turn take ages (of wonder lol) since you can get into multiple battles each turn, and each battle will take between five and ten minutes each, but I'll still take that over watching the fight play out automatically like in Civilization.
Plus, for me at least, the fantasy setting here is wayyy more interesting than the real-life backdrop in Civ.
If the game was cheaper, this would be an instant buy. But since it came out less than two years ago, it's still full price (and download only, which is weird for a game like this). I'll probably wait until it goes on sale, but I definitely want to try more of this!