Nice strategy! Play it for 2 days now. Its like "comfy turtling zone", until your opponents start attacking you all time.
Each part of economy is neatly balanced. Food and wood is being consumed all time, there is harsh shortage of supply during winter. To get gold you need to sell something or depend on sea raiding. You need to assign villager to specific profession, and send them to other jobs as game demand. Stone upgrade buildings, iron units. There is Lore which allow you to research little bonuses, on which I depend way too much to survive. Global military xp unlock you 4x passive skills (except maybe Milita, which are 4x dudes to help you defend your land).
Happiness regulate speed of creating new villagers. Hunger, lack of housing, high population reduce happiness, and you never have enough manpower. Unless ofc when you have too much compare to the food you can get and they all start dying from hunger (i think everyone start losing HP, and you cannot just kill few).
Military is important to conquer and defend yourself, but usually i have 2 units, increased to 4..6 in time of conquest. Rather simple: Hero, tower & 3x type of rock paper scissor units.
IIRC there is like 5x victory conditions, mostly by accumulating another resource (Fame, commercial influence) and looks like you should aim for the one that the map condition make most favorable for you. (f.ex. if you have multiple stone menhir in your land, you should go for tech victory). There are some more exotic goals, but i didnt try to achive them as I was too overwhelm with trying to survive.
Usual RTS freedom of doing whatever you want is restricted by chunk of territories that limit your building numbers, and how far you can travel (because you need explore fog of war with dedicated worker-scouts).
Great game have lots of fun with it. Really like how well thought out every element of gameplay is - everything have pros/cons, you need to use everything and all time there is shortage of all resources, even the one that you think you have plenty.
There is tons of DLC clans, but i dont really see the point. They are like Age of Empires civilization - mostly the same with different bonuses or some single special building/unit.
I never win a skirmish game, but i blame NPC that always team up against me
.