I have thousands of hours in Civ 6, but Civ 7 has Denuvo, so Civ 7 isn't even in consideration for me. I bet I'm not the only one. I'm sure the game has plenty of other issues, but Denuvo is such a non-starter

Absolutely the same. I think a more complex strategy game probably gets hit harder by people with our thought process then say COD.

Seriously. There are so many good games out there that it takes me zero effort to not play games with denuvo or published by ubisoft. Those are my two criteria which immediately disqualify buying a game for me personally. I’ll simply play something else.

I skipped it for the same reason at launch. Eventually I dropped windows completely and that was no longer an issue, but I had already moved on. Recently I had an opportunity to play it for a while and I was quite surprised that despite having many flaws, the game also has a ton of good things. Mostly quality of life changes but they improved so many things in relation to civ 6 that it's an absolute shame they butchered the game itself with its main "selling point". If they made a game with all of those changes but without the Eras system it would probably be criticised for not innovating much, but people would be playing it. Personally I'm not necessarily against the Eras system, but the way they implemented it is just the worst. I'm fine with the idea of changing civs every era, but the eras themselves now feel like different matches of a game. Once an era ends, you have to drop anything you didn't finish and start new goals, but everything you did finish will give you powerful buffs in the next era - so you basically need to work into achieving everything every time. There's no room for playing the long game, or doing your own thing. If you set up the game to be so long that each era lasts for 400 turns, then you kinda get back that freedom to do whatever you want (to some extent) - but then by the time you reach the modern era you'll have so many buffs that you win the game before you do anything modern.

Isn't Europa Universalis 4 better then this? From the reviews that I read, the game is in an absoluely bad state.