I'm surprised to hear there are high core count requirements. My understanding was that grand strategies were always going to be performance-limited based on single core performance, given the interlinkedness of all game variables.
But 16 cores? Not just 16 threads, but cores, where the total number of possible simultaneous threads is 32? Or is this them hedging for the total number of cores where cores could also be Intel e cores?
Either way, I'll be interested to see CPU utilization when people test out the game :)
With zero knowledge of how it works, I would also expect that each tick is some trivial calculations to determine yield per square for each city (plains square starts at +1 * 3 workers * 1.2 improvement modifiers) and combat resolution. Deterministic calculations that should complete instantly.
But for turn-based offline games, players with fewer cores can substitute a bit of patience. They can use the time to think as well as the computer.