Prepare to have your life stripped away from you, turn by turn.
That were exactly my thoughts :D Managed to do without gaming for many years now, but now that Civilization is on my hard drive again...
I've given up on Civilization in favor of Europa Universalis IV. What it lacks in epic-scale from the ancient era, it makes up for with lovely detail. Attrition may kill more of your army than the enemy, peasant uprisings and revolts are common (rather than signs of epic mismanagement), papal elections and the Protestant Reformation are intricately structured gameplay mechanics... or you could play as the Aztecs and contend with a 'doom' countdown which can only be sated by occupying enemy lands for human sacrifice. :P
Code generation is broken: "You must have cookies enabled to get a code." Well, I do.
I had to disable my adblocker for the code to appear.
If you get "Cookies must be enabled" just open the tab in incognito, which is really ironic haha.
try a different browser. Someone else mentioned that as an issue too, I suspect a plugin conflict?