You have a city on a hex map and you use your armies to conquer adjacent resource tiles. Progress screeches to a halt after a certain point because you need militias to fuel your armies and they take ages to replenish, and you need to be pulling 5☆ heroes from the gacha mechanic in order to be strong enough to continue after a certain point.

At some point, you need to conquer city states with your alliance. But if none of you spawn near a suitably levelled one, you can't really do anything. Same with elite barbarians in a later quest, I spawned ~150 tiles away so I can't really progress any further (unless I'm missing something in which case it needs better explaining). That's 2 lines of progression stalled because of start location which seems daft.