If you believe civ switching and ages are anathema to the franchise, that's a bit more than being slightly put off.
There are many changes across the franchise that for some (whole demographics, really) are anathema. There are enough Civ IV fans posting in these threads who think the franchise jumped the shark at CiV to demonstrate that
Is the game doing poorly a rejection of the core mechanics, as you and others argue, or is it something that can be salvaged given the state of the game on release? Or did the state of the game on release prevent the game from being successful enough to consider being salvaged?
Two contrary examples here, both games that I like.
Firstly, Dawn of War III. The game was actually stable and polished enough on release. Full campaign, limited number of MP maps (but not new for DoW on release in that regard). Controversial design. Maps were released in short order. But the game never achieved a stable playerbase. We're talking less than 1,000 concurrent players in a matter of months. Regardless of the changes implemented by the developers, directly from the players in pretty much every instance, it wasn't enough.
Secondly, Age of Empires IV. Game had some notable stability issues on release, but a solid amount of content. Design wasn't that controversial at all (similar to AoE II with some riffs on AoE III mechanics to diversify faction design). Underbaked in places (naval). But a really slow patching schedule post-release that really prevented it from taking off. A free expansion (a year later) bundled into a special edition on Steam, patching picking up pace (three - four big updates a year, with smaller monthly patches) and the playerbase rose considerably. It's still not beating AoE II, but it's beating every other AoE game (including AoE III: DE, which even went F2P in an attempt at widening its appeal). For an RTS game, IV is now doing fine.
