Age of Wonders III with both DLC packs is on sale for ~$12.
It's a turn-based fantasy 4X with both an aboveground and underground layer, traditional fantasy races alongside some less traditional ones, and a heavy combat/conquest focus. Additionally, your leader is an actual military unit with a class. They, and heroes you can hire (in limited numbers) have diverse choices as they level up. You get units both from your race and from your leader's class, and different leaders get access to different selections of spells to research and deploy. Ordinary units are also capable of leveling up, though their upgrades are predetermined. Each race gets unique traits which can affect both the strategic and tactical layer.
Additionally, rather than combat being smashing stacks, armies are strictly limited to a small number of units, and combat is a turn-based tactics gameplay layer (which you can skip, if for some odd reason you want to).
It's a solid game and addresses a lot of the issues I have with Civ and similar games. There's even an option to turn off city founding entirely so that you only get your starting city and can acquire more only by allying and vassalizing the neutral cities that spawn at the start of the game, or by conquering them and enemy cities.