Yes, the game requires a lot of tuning and that scares me. Actually the strategy is simple - against bots at least - just pause and catch wild patterns. The bots are not trivial, they can catch the patterns too. But they don’t plan, don’t scheme. What would be really interesting though is to see how PvP would work. Then the most advanced strategies and counter-strategies can be discovered.
What dragged me into this was exactly the fragility of the world. You don’t build walls with more and more hit points. All you can do is to build strategic depth, guard your resources, and keep expansion rolling forward.
Attacking is quite difficult, you need to push forward a few times to get results. That’s were guns are useful, intruding into enemy territory consistently.
If you play in Sandbox you will discover the endgame patterns.
Have you discovered the recording function? As the game is deterministic, you can share the games you played for others to review and the recording is small.