2K lays off dozens of Firaxis employees, mostly those working on Woke Civ7
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
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The Humankind decision, and later the Civ 7 decision, screams to me of trying to mask incompetant AI design.
The norm in Civ games/clones is to give the CPU players huge bonuses to make up for the player dancing around their poorly coded tactics.
This leads to most difficulties the player ends up steamrolling past the CPU, and never losing that momentum.
The era reset is such a retarded idea. These games are about planning, min/maxxing. Every era you get a soft reset, and lose huge swathes of territory, cities, momentum? Just to mask a sub-par CPU opponent problem?
Plus it forces you due to RNG, to choose one of the leaders you might not ever pick. Bringing 'equity' to the overall player base stats. it's subversive and manipulative.
Civ is one of those games where the beginning is always the funnest part, and by about half way most people lose the steam to finish. Something it shares with a lot of CRPGs and SPRGs, plus a few others.
You start at equal footing with the CPU and have an abundance of choices in front of you, with a lot of opportunity for organic and unique gameplay to emerge. Even if they are retarded or cheating, lots can happen. By the time everything stabilizes, all the open land is settled it just becomes a slog of either you've already won but need to wait 100 turns to achieve it, or the opposite.
You aren't really ever going to fix that. Even if the CPU get much better, then they will just roll you because they are AI making perfect decisions. Focusing on doing so is a losing fight, as any change to do so (as you described) ruins the game for most people who are playing it just for the "promise" of challenge that isn't fun.
The only solution would be to make multiplayer less cumbersome, so that people are actually willing to sit and play it to the end. But I can't think of a way to do that, even my own family never plays more than 2 sessions on any new map.