If you want to avoid fighting, I don't think this is your game. Play Civ or something. Actually better yet... go play Minecraft which you likely have already done..

The trick is to find the MineColonies mod. This lets you run a village, recruit guards, etc. It worked on 1.12, 1.16 which you can run these instances of the game using various mod loaders such as GDLauncher.

Only on 1.12 but Ancient Warfare is a great companion mod to the above as it also lets you build structures, recruit NPCs, have an army. It has good moving of resources around via couriers and populates the world with lots of other factions and strongholds. Siege weapons, etc.

I feel like this would be more satisfying than Valheim with your stated intentions. Getting some texture packs will help the graphics situation too.