Are there any games nowadays that are CPU bound to the extent that you'd see a big performance improvement by using a high-end processor?
Overwatch is one game where in order to get 240hz, your RAM speed and timing can be a bigger bottleneck than your graphics card.
Games like X-COM have the luxury of only having to advance the simulation every so often. The rest is just rendering the game's view.
0: https://www.pcgamesn.com/intel-i9-9900k-review-benchmarks#nn...
1: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i9-9900k-9th...
If you want to run the latest games on max settings at 4K/120hz, it's a different story. Personally? I remember when reviews gushed over 30fps at 800x600.
[0] https://techreport.com/review/34192/intel-core-i9-9900k-cpu-...
No one much cares about the framerate in civ6. It's about AI turn calculations in the end of the game, which is what the benchmarks people were linking are.
I think basically as you're building up this tree you'd add annotations at each branch/ply which call out things the human user (opponent) could do that strengthen or weaken the position. Then as the human performs their actions, the tree is pruned/rebuilt accordingly.
The other complication is it isn't just 1 on 1, its 1 player vs ~10 players. So your move changes player 2's move changes player 3's move and so on.
as well competitive gamers want ~140+ FPS so even when gameplay code is not super complex per frame, it is a lot of frames.
For the time being, even with latest versions, single-threaded cpu performance is the largest concern in these sims.