I mean the statement was made that it’s not a strategy game, it’s a builder.
FWIW, I play Civ as an empire builder, I don’t like warmongering and I’ve always wished it was possible to play a more cooperative game. Instead, if I want any sort of challenge I need to bump up the difficulty to the point where the AI will attack (for no apparent gain, it’s not like we’re competing over the same resources/area. I’m sure the AI just sees it has more units and so goes to war) and proceed to spend the next 50 turns ineptly throwing an unending tide of units at me that a city and a couple ranged units can annihilate on their own. And with 1UPT, it makes the turns take forever because a couple dozen units have to be individually moved instead of combined into a stack. And then the game just grinds down into tedium while I slog through it, there’s few if any interesting decisions for the “just one more turn feel”, and I quit once again.
It’s obviously a terrible wargame but the game insists on foisting that aspect of it on me every time I played it. I don’t find it a good strategy game at all because while there’s a lot of plates to spin, it’s just a distraction from the fact that most of the game systems just don’t work or at least work well. And I don’t like it as a builder because I have to deal with the tedium I mentioned in the previous paragraph.
It’s just not a good game, IMO. Which sucks because this was the PENULTIMATE strategy game franchise. :P