I have a multiplayer game that's finally at a stage where I feel its ready to try and build a player base but I'm quite lost as to what I should prioritize. This is a passion project and I'm not considering monetization at all at this point, my goal is having a player base so I have people to play with, my years spent as a hobbyist game developer aided me greatly in my career as a software architect so In that sense my time spent on game dev is already justified. I'm also willing to pay for marketing, if I can just figure out what would be most effective.

the game is hosted at https://empirerising.net​ ​

The genre is turn based strategy with rts elements, It's a mix of lords of the realm, heroes of might and magic and warcraft 3, So it's quite niche. The game is completely web based, but not at all what most people expect when they think of web games… my target audience is hardcore turn based strategy, RPG, and maybe RTS lovers but I'm struggling to find places to reach such audiences. I'm thinking of using google ads but due to the perception around web games and games advertised via google ads I'm very skeptical about it. Other things I think about is reaching out to youtubers, even sponsoring one, using a marketing agency, spamming every forum I can find, just continuing to polish the game and hope someone notices one day… Its possible there are some good forums out there where this type of player lurks that I don't know about, then again, I myself am this type of player and I don't lurk on any game related forums…

So yea, Any advice/ideas on marketing my somewhat niche multiplayer game would be greatly appreciated.