Yeah each NPC civilization will do their own thing, though they might not be “hyper” on any one cultural direction. Each Civilization will have different problems with different Resource shortages that they need to address based on where they live and how they are connected with each other.
Please note most civilizations will have like 100 or so NPCs at most, because at some point I do need to care about performance, even though NPCs are gonna be quite optimized to work “offscreen”.
Also nothing will prevent outoforder progression, but good luck actually pulling it off without building at least the tools needed out of the other materials. Afterall, you CAN have Tungsten early but you sure as fuck cant anneal or melt it without infrastructure.