I've been a fan of the civilization series since II. However I haven't played all of them due to being busy at different points in my life. Didn't play VI for example, but I did enjoy V, some of the DLC for it was good IIRC.
I'm concerned about the pre-order push, and that there is going to be a Switch version. But it does look like it could be good? No way I'm pre-ordering, but would like something to look forward to.
One of the biggest problems with Civ 6 was that the AI couldn't play it's own game.
The AI posed zero military threat once you survived the initial Ancient era.
Other CPU players could be difficult to conquer at times because of how OP walls are. But they hardly ever rebuilt units once they take some initial losses. They never declare war passed the midgame and never pose any existential military threat.
A lot of players liked all the DLC that Civ 6 had. But all the extra features simply compounded the problem that the AI couldn't handle the base game, let alone each new layer of complexity.
So far with Civ 7, there hasn't been much focus from the devs re: improved AI. They've completely overhauled all the game mechanics wrt changing civs midgame, no districts, soft settlement caps, took away builders, revamped the era system, etc.
The chance that they made so many drastic changes means it's unlikely that they've invested enough resources into making competent and challenging AI.
Civ is one of the most famous examples throughout gaming history of "difficulty levels just gives free resources to the AI." Its always been basically lobotomized and retarded, and was playing a completely different game than you were that just traveled along the roughly same path.
Its very much a game meant to be played with real people, but its also impossible to get that many people together for that long.
They really should make a single player focused Civ game, but I have zero expectations that they would be able to do it well. An indie developer might be able to pull it off though.
I used to play World of Tanks on console.
The dev team, which was separate from the PC version, would openly admit that certain features of the game couldn't be improved or changed because no one from the OG programming team remained. And no one from the existing team understood their legacy code.