I played Sorcerer King a little, and it's boooooooring. Video explains that you need to survive, game text says that you need to survive... But gameplay says that you do your generic 4X stuff.

I think most developers of the "survival" games make the same mistake - they add a lot of game mechanics that make you survive.

That's a completely wrong game design, especially in a 4X survival game. You basically do your own stuff like usual and either you have enough "stuff" to survive or you don't. And most of the time you know if you're going to win long before the actual end of the game, just as in other 4X games.

What should have been done is to design a survival game with a lot of ways to lose (in other words, not to survive). Look at some of the most known recent turn-based "survival" games like Faster than Light or Darkest Dungeon - there are some ways to actually lose the game or at least lose a progress in a game. And when you know how to avoid them all, more or less, they lose a lot of replay value.

So, the depth of turn-based "survival" games lies in a number and complexity of game mechanics that makes you fail. And a king of that is most likely Dwarf Fortress. DF clones implement ways to survive, just like Sorcerer King, ignoring the ways to fail, so they fall to obscurity, which further proves my point. You can't compete in a "survival" category if a player doesn't need to survive through all ways to fail that await said player in your game.

Sorcerer King implemented exactly zero new game mechanics that makes the player fail. I'm sorry, but a race against the clock was invented before i started playing, and i'm playing computer games for more than 20 years already. Sure, there are some ways to slow down the clock, but it was implemented in arcade games before i went to school. And it's bascially the only very easy and obvious game mechanics anyway, there is exactly zero complexity in that, so it's just boring.

Remove the doomsday clock, and you get your Master of Magic clone, even AI is about as retarded as it was in original Master of Magic. But wait, Master of Magic had the same doomsday clock too, AIs can cast a Spell of Mastery So, we got a dumbed down MoM clone, that's about it. And just as with DF, all Master of Magic clones fallen into obscurity too.