Want to replay your favorite old map from Civ 7? Sorry, the servers have been turned off, back to Civ 17 and the Season 3 Persons Wonders and Specialists pack for $79.95...
Not everything has to have "multiplayer elements".
Keep great single player games offline.
And as an aficionado of sandboxes and software toys who's been playing Civ since Civ I, it would feel far emptier to me to turn Civ into yet another PvP/meta/challenge oriented snoozefest.
By empty, I simply meant that the game stopped being interesting after a while. The single player game was only so replay-able, and multi-player is a very different game that doesn't suit me.
What Civ has is a great community, but that community had no way to experience content together.
Hand crafted scenarios that people can play simultaneously and share their experiences isn't a multiplayer element, it's a community element.
https://forums.civfanatics.com/forums/civ4-game-of-the-month...
https://www.filfre.net/2023/01/sequels-in-strategy-gaming-pa...
(And leaderboards might be even older, dating back to Civ1, considering how Sid Meier with Civ (and his other games) emphasized roleplaying and surviving to the end of the game rather than «winning», whatever that means ?)