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.
I didn't even realise that the AI was so bad because I couldn't bring myself to play the game that much and study it. This goes back to my long running theory on game dev in general where I think that what likely happens is you have some third party contractors maybe or some expert programmers staying short term at the beginning of the project to get things up to speed.
They take their money and then leave the 'DLC devs' to it to keep adding stuff except as you point out because they keep adding all these new features in the old AI simply can't keep up because the game hadn't been designed around any of the new features.
This is why I believe for example Creative Assembly does what it does with spamming endless DLC. They simply don't have the expertise anymore to have people look through the code and fix shit or add new AI code to make things at least work. Shocker, no one with that level of skill would work with a bunch of woke arseholes on top of it they're going to go off and do their own thing because they can.
Which of course explains why so much of the innovation is coming from the indie sphere or people are forming their own companies with investor backing these days. Base greed is obviously a main driver behind DLC policy but I think it's also a tactic to cover up how much of a brain drain these companies are suffering from. Pretty soon it's going to get so bad with the DEI targets and everything I bet any of the artists who aren't woke will be quitting as well because I wouldn't want that crap anywhere near my portfolio.
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.