Sounds like you had an exciting game. I’m really enjoying it myself. I like that it frequently makes us choose between mutually exclusive options. You can’t take every civic – you have to turn down half of them. When choosing which techs to learn to exploit a strategic resource, you forever exclude learning the alternative techs. The events are more standard in games like this, but even so, the choices are meaningful.
And yeah, exploration is really clever. The map is bigger than it seems at first.
You mentioned a guide. Where is that to be found? Some of the descriptions of techs and buildings could use further explanation.