This situation is tough because on one hand I want devs to experiment and try new things because innovation is important but on the other when you radically change the core gameplay of a long standing franchise you're bound to upset a lot of people.

Civ is a game where waiting a year or two before buying the newest one is always the right move and 7 looks to be a perfect example of that.

On an unrelated note have you seen that new Star Trek game Tobold? I saw about an hour of gameplay and thought it looked pretty interesting. Its kind of like Xcom or Fallout Shelter base building with resource management wrapped in a Star Trek skin.
 

I'm showing my age here, but for me Star Trek has Captain Kirk, Spock, and Scotty. I don't know who Captain Janeway is, nor the other characters on the Voyager.
 

Is this a case of players not actually wanting what they tell you they want? There’s that cited statistic that “only 3% (or 5%, or 8%) of Civ players ever finish the game that they start” … but maybe that is neither a good nor a bad thing. The cure ended up worse than the disease.
 

This is good news to me. As it stood, Civ 7 was probably gonna be the first Civ ever I would skip entirely. If they can cobble something decent out of this overhaul, I may eventually pick it up on sale. I've been playing them since around '91! That's a lot of years.
 

Gotta expand your horizons! There is some really good stuff in the other Trek shows. I grew up with Picard as my Captain.
 

I'm the author of the Civ VII Post-mortem over on civfanatics, where I argued that beyond the obvious controversies around civ-switching and age transitions, there are more fundamental issues with the game that impact replayability. The first is Agency, most notably the Legacy Paths creating an "on rails" feel, which I took inspiration from reading one of @Tobold's original posts on the game. The second is Balance, where the game's civilizations are balanced more like a multiplayer game than a single-player, resulting in bland Wonders and boring leader abilities. The last is the removal of major swaths of Complexity, over simplifying gameplay systems and removing the organic interactions between those systems which provided variability across multiple play throughs. So even with the changes to civ switching, I'm not sure it's going to be enough to provide the replayability that gives the game a long life.

The really difficult truth is that Civ VII's biggest competitors are Civ V and VI, both of which have years of content in DLC and mods. Some people have said "Wait for VIII", but those problems will still be there. Firaxis is in a difficult position - they need to give Civ VII a unique voice, but it still feels more like they are reacting rather than staking out a vision, getting feedback, and moving towards that vision. I'm hoping they can turn that around, because nobody wins if they fail.
 

I'm reminded of the story of Abraham Wald and the bullet-hole patterns on surviving WW2 bombers. Failed attempts to increase bomber survival rate concentrated on armoring the areas with the bullet holes. Wald realized the areas WITHOUT the bullet holes were where the planes that didn't survive were hit and that those areas were what needed more armor.

Similarly, the Civ series had thirty years of phenomenal success despite players not finishing games. So why on earth would Firaxis feel that finishing games is a problem that needs to be addressed?