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.
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.
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.
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.