I wonder if Humankind is good. I vaguely recall some reviews saying the victory conditions were a little too luck based / uncontrollable ?
Might be remembering it wrong.
It's not the worst 4x game on Steam but it's the worst 4x game Amplitude has put out. They've had a year of a few big patches and ended up just disabling one of the late-game mechanics (pollution) because they could not actually make it function in any way that didn't end the game in a few turns in an auto loss (including if the AI built pollution which was the main issue).
It's BETTER than it was, for sure, and I eventually will revisit it, but it's so, so disappointing - they had a really good premise and just clearly rushed it out the door way too early. I would still consider it to be in early access. and they have some pretty big system changes they're trying to figure out for the road ahead.
They also kept putting out time-limited challenges to unlock "avatars" in-game which the community UNIVERSALLY asked them to stop and they did it twice more before finally just... not doing that content at all instead of making it not time limited.
I know it's a smaller studio but it feels like their management needs to change, because people solved a lot of the balance problems with math in the forum and just got ignored by the team.
Edit: I will say, the victory conditions were never luck based or uncontrollable in my 3-4 games I finished. The "pollution" loss condition was an issue but that's removed by default, and in the initial release 99% of the time you were just going to win via tech no matter what you chose to do for the first 9/10 of the game because it was so stupendously fast once you got to the final age. That has been rebalanced but I'm not clear how much just from reading the notes.
Edit 2 because I forgot I was going to say this: All that said, I'd still play this again over Civ 5/6 because I have hundreds of hours in both those games and honestly don't feel like there's anything new to experience in them, but at least in Humankind I can goof around with different histories