By comparison, Civ V has the building blocks of a quality game. If rebalancing strengthens badly underpowered options such that they become meaningful, this can become a quality product. You would end up with a game similar to Civ II that doesn't provide a lot of challenge, but does provide a sandbox permitting a lot of possible approaches.
If you're judging the game on the strength of the AI, though, I'd say it's a hopeless case. In hindsight, we should have expected the outcome given the radically new 1UPT mechanic. The devs had to create new combat AI from scratch, and it took a lot of iterations to get an AI that could perform decently under the stack-of-doom regime.