In Axioms of Dominion there are 3 modes. "civ start", "paradox start" and "player sculpted start". This post is specifically focused on the "civ start" mode. In this mode you start with a race unique to your nation. The standard start is a humanish race as the base race. "National" races are a base race or a designed race that uses national nouns. So your national base race could be elves but they'd be called Abyssians if your nation was Abyssia.
One major part of Axioms that is missing from all over strategy games is developing your race and culture and society in general. Since the game is fantasy you can breed with various other races or even crossbreed with creatures or w/e. Well, unless your people are racial purists. Or if you aren't an absolute ruler maybe you can only incentivize interbreeding, but that's a topic for another post.
Depending on your goals, both gameplay and flavor wise, you could find a lost race or a rare creature and engage in a centuries long program of interbreeding to give your nation a unique character and unique culture or just purely for power. Potentially if you conquered an area with a habitat you were not suited for you might interbreed with native races or use magic to acquire traits of native creatures to become more productive in your new lands. Alternative you might magically alter your territory as well as your race at the same time to give yourself a large advantage there and/or make it seem inhospitable to potential enemies.
Axioms keeps track of a relatively large number of factors affecting the climate of regions/provinces in the game. You essentially have both natural and magical factors that affect the climate of each region/province. Your population does adapt naturally over time in both knowledge and form to different environments but the magic efforts discussed above can greatly accelerate the process.
Variables in climate include things like altitude, temperature, ambient sources of various magical energies, soil acidity, soil quality, rainfall, sunlight, etc. Different plants and animals prefer different climates. Altering climate provides advantages as long as you don't accidentally drive valuable animal or plant species to extinction.
If this seems complicated that's because it is. However keeping track of more information for each province/region, race, character, crop, and creature allows for a much different style of gameplay than is possible with a more abstract system like that used in Civ or other simplistic 4x games. You can create races/nations with vastly different compositions and gamestyles and there is also more variety that can generate conflict and interesting diplomacy/politics for those aspects of the game. Also adds to the economic gameplay.
On that note a major part of the game involves the aspects of your nation that are political and cultural rather than racial. Axioms allows unprecedented variety in how you manage your populace. You are able to apply laws based on racial, national, religious, class/caste, and other such factors. You can forge a nation which uses conquered humans/dwarves as a labor caste while the ruling castes are elvish/dragon/flameborn types with powerful magic and superior education. You might only allow dragon bred elves to be priests or researchers or learn the magical knowledge your society possesses. Purebred elves may be the only ones allocated management and administrative duties.
Class/caste based societies have unique costs and benefits as do nationalist single race societies and more diverse nations. Nationalist single race nations are far less likely to have uprisings during wars. A society with a racial underclass might have issues with revolts if a same race kingdom who promises better lives invades. Diverse nations have more potential revolting populations but since there isn't a race based class/caste system they have less incentive to revolt. My goal is to make it so that different political and cultural choices only result in trade offs rather than having say a high literacy level diverse gender equal democracy be strictly superior which is something many games do. Victoria and Civ for instance. Similarly slavery or gender limitations have their downs but also their ups. Higher birthrates could offset preventing smarter women from being scientists and such in a society with strictly divided gender roles.
Different nations will also have a diverse use of livestock, whether for food, labor, or conflict. One nation might ride dragons to war while another may use leviathans for sea power. Another nation might use behemoths for construction or goods moving.
Essentially the player will slowly build up their own unique nation/race, which you can then save for scenarios, in the style of Conquest of Elysium, Endless Legend or Master of Magic races. Those games/companies tend to use premade races that can't change much over time.
