Hotseat is so slow once you get in the modern era and if you want to play it like a real civ game it must be on multiple computers so you don't have to wait 20 min for your turn.
Whether you *like* hotseat or not is irrelevant to the legal point at hand.
The legal point is; one license means you get to run the application on one machine at once.
If you don't like the multiplayer version that allows you to play multiplayer using only a single machine, thats a totally reasonable preference, but it doesn't entitle you to run the game on multiple machines.
Legally; playstation games let you run on one machine at a time.
PC licenses are no different.
The correct conclusion here is; console games are designed better to run multiplayer on a single system. PC games aren't designed well to do that.
But thats a game design issue, not a legal issue.
I don't really get it, PC games have been like this from inception and nothing has changed.
Precisely. The only thing that has changed is that its now harder to break the license agreement.
[Note; there *were* a few games in past whose licenses let you do some multiplayer on multiple machines at once. Eg blizzard games that let you have both a normal install and then a "spawn" install which disabled all features except playing multiplayer with a full install.
Its a shame that there aren't any license agreements like that anymore.]