Grand strategy, arcade style.
This game does "grand strategy" better than a lot of the big "grand strategy" games do. You'll see the map change hands meaningfully over time, and your abstractions (like technology) are both grounded and comprehensible. A whole match can take an hour or less on lower difficulty settings.
The game has great onboarding (tutorial, in-game reference, video tutorials). From there, it's single player skirmishes, or multiplayer.
The music is more than serviceable. After playing for about 5 hours, I hadn't yet tired of it. The sound effects are sparse but impactful (notifications). The art is very functional, but also pleasant.
As for things that could be improved upon to make the most difference:
* The UI could use some improvement. For example, it's hard to discover -- and I learned it only after seeing the options multiplayer has and went looking -- that you can change the single player map settings (number of victory points required and the different values of the various targets).
* Also on the UI, it's not always the easiest to tell some of the terrain at boundaries (though you can sometimes click around and get it to pop up that terrain's icon), nor easily compare your power to the opponents in the clearest ways. The info is there, and findable, just not in a very convenient way compared to what could be done.
* The game doesn't have "continue after victory", which would be fun. The match will end as soon as victory is reached.
* The game really could use hot seat/same computer multiplayer.
* A map editor would be great!
* Single player replay-ability is a little bit limited due to fewer options than other games, but I'd urge caution in wishing for additional features that might bloat the game beyond its elegant, abstract core.
This review does not evaluate multiplayer, other than it looks like it has decent options, and during my quick investigation, I saw a couple matches populate and get started, so people do seem to be playing if that's important to you.