I know we are going further and further into the off-topic, but I wouldn't actually describe PDX games as RTS. There is no real time, it's tick based – which also aren't the same as turns, of course. But in a real time game, your decisions have an immediate impact (and not after some threshold), and thus whether you give and order faster or slower has an impact. An extreme case (to me) is micro in Age of Empires 2. To succeed in this, you have to learn at what frame of an archer shot or skirmisher throw you can order them to move so that the shot still gets through while moving away from the enemy for exactly as long as it takes to fire a second one. Hence, in RTS, not even a second is a reasonable unit to describe what's happening. Ticks are different: it doesn't matter if you order your troops at the beginning of a tick or at the end of a tick (which represent days in EU4): they will arrive in their destination at the same tick regardless. Similarly, you can order them at the beginning of a tick and then give a different order later the same day, and there is no "loss of action/time/space" or anything. Of course, if you run speed 5, ticks are gone very short (up to 20 per second) and it might feel like an RTS to move around troops. But if you play 1-3 or use a pause, the difference is very clear.
Hence, I think the PDX grand strategy titles are neither turn based nor RTS, but a middle ground that I personally find better for video games than the other two (by now – earlier in my life, I loved RTS): individual and situation-dependent pacing with infinite time for decision making (in single player, that is). I love turn based for board games though, but even there, many games have broken traditional concepts of what a turn encompasses and are neither "all your actions in one turn, then next player" nor "one action per turn, then next player". I think civ's infinite possible actions per turn, with actions multiplying throughout the game based on number of settlements and units is unbearable in a traditional turn-based setting in multiplayer, whether in a video game nor as a board game. It works in single player, but I can't fathom why anyone would be interested to play a game that takes 30 hours and where the majority of time is spent as downtime. It might have been fun in the days of play-by-mail (which also eliminates down time in a way). Yet, apparently, a change to this formula (e.g., Amplitude's simultaneous turns or civ's simultaneous or dynamic turns in MP) is not welcomed by all, as I had to learn.
