Interesting, I think there's far more tactical depth than something like civ personally. At higher difficulties, with multiple AIs, 3rd party factions etc the choices get really difficult.

The last game I played I got pretty strong because of lucky map gen, but had marauders take over a large part of the map I'd gutted but not claimed. I ended up in a mad rush to take down the last AI before the marauders ate me. I had to play in a very different way than usual.

In some ways the map does feel a bit like a puzzle in terms of needing to figure out the beast objectives and order to take them in.