Old World

I bought Old World because it was on a 90% sale, but of course also because it is one of the highest rated turn-based 4X games to have come out in the past few years. Sadly, this says more about the poor state of 4X releases than the quality of the game.

Old World is a Civ-like, if you will. You play as a single nation, expanding upon a hex grid map, starting from but a tiny city. The big difference is that while there is technological progression, the game is more focused on the older times, hence the name, ending before the renaissance era. Most else is the same, with expanding your borders, improving resources, building infrastructure and armies, and waging war. There's a large new system with families and dynasties, and what the relations of different characters are to your current leader. This can shape both internal politics, giving bonuses or disadvantages to production, as well as external politics, influencing trade or war. Your current leader also dies after every couple dozen turns, forcing you to build most relationships up again.
My favorite change from Civilization is that cities now have set locations they can be built on the map, meaning there won't be a city every 4 tiles in every direction. Unit managment was also heavily changed, with a global pool of actions shared across all your units. I can't say I liked this though, because most units could now move triple the tiles if you put more actions on them, shattering the idea of a battlefront. Many of the other systems are very similar though, and I actually wish they had tried to do a bit more innovation, because most changes were positive in my eyes, if not very influential, like randomizing the tech tree a bit, so you wouldn't progress through it the same each game.

But how does it compare? Well, sadly I feel like they took a step forward, but two steps back. I don't hate any of the changes they made inherently. While the people management aspect seemed a bit uncomfortable at first, it's honestly a system like any other, if perhaps suffering a bit more from the following problem - there are too many decisions to be made. I think this can be partially attributed to the UI not being the best it can be, meaning you don't have the information for every decision available as you make said decision, but mainly that the consequences of these decisions aren't that impactful. You can't not make the decisions, but making them arbitrarily also feels really against what a strategy game should be like.
In conclusion, it's a bit too similar to Civilization V or 6, and doesn't, as a whole, offer a better experience, so there's little reason to recommend it.