Rob bought himself Endless Legend, the hex-based 4X game from Amplitude. They're the same guys who made Endless Space, the space strategy game that won me over when, in my first playthrough, I crossed through a wormhole to be confronted with a supermassive star empire bent on my destruction just like in Deep Space 9.
Endless Legend that plays somewhat like a cross between HoMM, Civ V and a board game. The basic nuts and bolts of FIDS are kept pretty much intact with the addition of a new resource, Influence, which is basically like Culture from Civ V. You use it to buy policies that give boosts to your faction, and you also spend it to do diplomacy things. These policies are set every 25 turns and you have to stick with those bonuses until next time. Fortunately, there are no penalties, but it also means that you can't, at any given time, pull all your points out of economic policies and dump them into military the second you're going to go to war.
Planning ahead is pretty important because you are apparently on a Game of Thrones world where you have only the vaguest idea of when summer and winter end. Winter is generally a very bad time and it gets progressively worse as the game goes on, sustaining penalties to army movement, income and production at first, and as time goes on and winter gets progressively harsher, additional penalties start cropping up. Having a surplus of money and, if necessary, food, is a key to surviving winter, as is having troops ready to protect your borders since their ability to react to threats is greatly reduced.
Cities function somewhat differently from most games. The map is divided up into regions, each having a name. When you build a city in a region, that region is claimed for you and nobody else can build there. You can have a city build extractors on resource tiles anywhere in the region, some of which are standard staples like gold or titanium, while others are materials previously established in the Endless Space universe like hydromiel, the food engineered by the Endless that grows in any environment and molds itself to the dietary needs of whatever eats it and is basically magic. A city obtains resources in two ways: population is assigned to work on a specific thing, like food, and they basically work in a vacuum making it. For every two population, you can build a new district for your city. Each district obtains resources from the tile it is on, as well as a smaller amount from the tiles surrounding it. To balance the obvious strategy of building a city shaped like a starfish to cover as many tiles as possible, a district gets a bonus when it is surrounded by four other districts. So your cities will often end up with differently-shaped urban areas depending on what terrain you want to exploit and whether you want to focus on extracting as much as possible from that or spreading out to different things.
Army-wise, each faction only has a few unique units. You are supposed to assimilate minor factions in to your empire to get auxiliary units. You know, like Rome did. My army is backed up by two-headed wolfmen and combat nuns because of course I would do that. You assimilate them by either attacking and destroying a settlement and then rebuilding it, bribing them into joining you, or doing a quest for the minor faction. While each region only has one minor faction in it, they may have more than one settlement, and each assimilated settlement is one free population, so violence or bribery tend to be the best options with only one settlement, while two or more usually means you should do their dumb quest to make them like you.
In combat, the units from an army spread out and fight each other kind of like in HoMM. Unlike in HoMM, they don't go to some separate fighting map, they do it on the world map. Therefore, the terrain you fight in can have a huge affect on the outcome. Cavalry units, who get attack bonuses from the number of hexes they move in a straight line before attacking, are fairly useless in mountainous terrain, while archers get rushed down and cut to pieces in an open field. Heroes are also far more useful leading armies than they are in Endless Space, because they don't just add passive bonuses, they're also usually pretty bad ass at killing people.
Can't comment on all the factions because I've only played three, but I really like all their aesthetics, and the three I have played all have very distinct play styles. The AI is fairly good at leveraging their particular advantages, although it's not quite on the level of GalCiv 2's, which doesn't even need to cheat to be good at the game. Unlike a lot of 4X games, each civilization has a quest to follow. It functions primarily to give you occasional rewards for doing things you should be doing while also serving for world-building. The Broken Lords, a faction made up of guys who used to be knights but are now ghosts haunting suits of armor that subsist on a combination of dust and sucking the life out of mortals, have a quest centering on the struggle whether or not it is okay to be a ghost Dracula, while the Drakken, a diplomatically-oriented race of dragon people who are probably the descendants of native animals uplifted by the Endless, focus on building alliances with minor factions and solidifying their defenses.
Visually, the game is quite charming in a different way than Civ V. While they're both hex-based, Civ managed to make the terrain flow together very well and not look too weird. Endless Legend has more of a board game aesthetic. It's terrain that is more polygonal, but with painted skins that give it real character and make the world feel like a giant Settlers of Catan board come to life, but with ghost Draculas and two-headed werewolves.
So in summary, Endless Legend is really good.
