Help finding an old game

Not sure if this is the right sub but I'm hoping someone can help me find the name of a PC game I played a lot as a kid.

The version that I had was only a demo from a disk that I think came from a cereal box, so I am not sure when the game would have been released but I played it in the early 2000s. What I remember from it:

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• The civilizations and the few demo campaign missions had a far east Asia inspiration (I want to say Japanese but I can't say for sure). The game was definitely in English though.
• I'm almost 100% certain it wasn't an age of empires game but it played very similarly.
• The systems were a bit simpler than AOE2 i.e. for human combat units you could only train swordsmen, pikemen, and archers. You were also able to create horses that you could make the units ride to turn them into cavalry.
  • You could also build siege weapons, and there was a dock to create ships, but none of the demo maps had water so I wasn't able to explore the naval side of the game.
• Instead of building your civilization on the mainmap, each player had a city that you could enter. In it there was a pre-built wall and gate and you could only build inside these walls.
• On the main map there were some smaller objectives like villages that boosted your gold production, and statues that if you sent units to pray to it would give you rewards.
• There was a hero recruitment system where you spent gold to get units that would have abilities.
  • I remember there being three classes of heroes, one of them had more powerful abilities but could not fight or fought very poorly, and I think the other two were more combat focused.
• When you destroyed the town hall of another city all of the remaining buildings and villagers would become yours and then you would have multiple cities to control for the remainder of the match.

If I can think of anything else I will add it to the post but hopefully, someone else remembers this game. Thanks in advance for you time!