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Aye, the taskmaster ran a mission on CFC and while I completely fell off the dev diaries after the initial announcement, the playthroughs online roped me in. I'm not even 100 turns into the first game yet but I love it: it's basically a fusion of Modern Civ, Call to Power & Humankind with the weaknesses sifted out. It addresses three of the biggest structural problems that tend to plague 4X: a slow early game, production bottlenecks, and cultural railroading. The way base city production is complemented by Domain Powers helps weaken (if not entirely break) the "industry = success" model, letting you field a pretty robust army even in the Stone Age. Civs develop organically in what's basically Humankind "done right": you can pick your specializations to exploit your immediate context, or to work a long game, and the mechanics are diverse enough that every play is viable.

Combat looks strongly influenced by CtP: the most important difference from Civ is that units fight as a stack ("army"), and army groups are always preferable to individual units—troop classes follow a rock-paper-scissors balance so mixed forces are more resilient. An early game "noob trap" is spreading units too thin: barbarians are common and act as a check on rapid early-game expansion, and can swarm explorers sallying too deep in the wilderness.

Perhaps the only major letdown is there's very little cosmetic flavour to the civs themselves (no leader portraits, no unit skins, &c.), though with PDX as the publisher we can expect to be drip-fed culture packs in DLC.

In sum: I think you'll like this one. Once I've had more experience I ought to write a dedicated review.

Anyway the Millennia plug was actually secondary to my original impetus, which is sharing this.

(Also The Sympathizer sounds like a must-watch.)

In unrelated but coincidentally fortuitous timing, I fell down a rabbit hole of pop-culture AI remixes, and Sandy remains the most based Texan.