I could see where suggesting 16 cores and more could be a good benchmark for a high-end experience with this game.

> For a playable experience targeting 1080p, Low settings, and 30 FPS, Firaxis recommends entry-level CPUs from Intel 10th Gen and AMD Ryzen's first generation— very old processors at this point that most PC gamers have likely long upgraded past. The graphics requirements of GTX 1050, RX 460, and Arc A380 are similarly reasonable. The old game's recommended RAM spec— 8 GB— is now the new minimum spec, probably the most significant bump for anyone already using 8 GB or less.

It's also nearly 2025 - for a desktop gaming rig, 32GB of RAM isn't really that unusual, and neither is 16 cores.

But 16 cores? Not just 16 threads, but cores, where the total number of possible simultaneous threads is 32? Or is this them hedging for the total number of cores where cores could also be Intel e cores?

Either way, I'll be interested to see CPU utilization when people test out the game :)

But for turn-based offline games, players with fewer cores can substitute a bit of patience. They can use the time to think as well as the computer.

What would a video game developer/publisher get out of you buying new hardware?

Steam Deck sets such an excellently low target for games, that they have to make possible, but it also does it at such a perfectly not-excessive resolution. So games need to target this pretty modest system, at modest resolution.

Beyond performance, it also encourages games to be considerate for low res gamers, fitting the elements on the screen and making everything readable & usable. It's amazing to me that info dense games like Last Spell (what an excellent squad town defender) have gotten ported & play well!

Deck has brought about such a fantastic renormalization of what PC games need to be able to do.

Au contraire, as a kid playing these games I really liked taking a moment to pause and zoom in and imagine the kinds of lives my people would be having.

Which is way more dough than a cash strapped players got. That's the kinda service for rich kids. Especially when you could just buy a used Xbox or Playstation in the current gen for a few hundred and a lower tier internet connection. Once it's saved and paid for its not a monthly drain like these subscription services...which if your tight on money a few months of the year because say work is sporadic and your low income can be a nightmare.

Inherently broken product/price platform. There's a reason it doesn't take off at the pace they expected to. It's marketed to poor kids but it's priced for the rich.

If your rich enough to afford game streaming and all the baggage it requires you just buy a gaming pc or console outright anyways. Folks like owning things, game streaming you own nothing and pay forever. Lose lose proposition.

For example, when they redesigned combat around the 1-Unit-Per-Tile (1UPT) mechanic for CIV 5, this crippled the ability of the AI to wage war. That's because even if a high-difficulty AI could out-produce the player in terms of military, they were logistics-limited in their ability to get those units to the front because of 1UPT. That means that the AI can't threaten a player militarily, and thus loses it's main lever in terms of it's ability to be "difficult."

Contrast this to Civ 4, where high-difficulty AIs were capable of completely overwhelming a player that didn't take them seriously. You couldn't just sit there and tech-up and use a small number of advanced units to fend off an invasion from a much larger and more aggressive neighbor. This was especially the case if you played against advanced fan-created AIs.

I'm hoping they get rid of 1UPT completely for Civ 7, but I have a feeling that it is unlikely because casual players (the majority purchaser for Civ) actually like that 1UPT effectively removes tactical combat from the game.