Is it really that noticeable? I don't remember ever watching a 24 fps film thinking 'this is jerky'. Is it more about the lag between input and response than any jerking?
In a low-fi "turn based" game like SC, it'd be pretty tolerable as long as the cursor still moves at a normal speed.
Anything with more animation or especially real-time input like in a first person game, if run at < 60FPS is immediately noticeable, and below 30FPS quickly becomes entirely unplayable.
Additionally, in the past I didn't think 24FPS movies were jerky, but now that I've started looking, there are lots of scenes that definitely look stuttery to me. In particular, watch for "smooth" panning shots and see how the farther background elements will jump and stutter across the screen. Excessive motion blur helps to hide some of the problem, but there's a limit to what the filmmakers can really do. There's a lot of cinematography rules to reduce or hide the problem, but that comes with cutting yourself off from lots of things you might otherwise want to do with the camera.
On the subject of movies, I remember hearing somewhere that Bruce Lee had to slow himself down for the cameras because if he moved like he actually fights, the 24fps cameras would just pick him up as a blur.
I'd love to see a martial arts movie shot at 60fps. That sounds like it would be the perfect use case for 60fps.
On a similar note, I understand that a lot of sports are broadcast in 60fps for this reason too.
This is true, thank you. I seem to conflate SimCity and the Civ games, for some reason, they seem to occupy a lot of the same spaces in my head.
That said, the fact that you can always pause at any time and there's never much time pressure to respond quickly to events does mean that the low framerate doesn't have much impact on the gameplay.
It does run fairly slow with some of the debug overlays on, but with the overlays off I get a solid 60fps - it's averaging about 4-5ms per frame draw without enabling the overlays. What kind of machine are you running it on? There's a ton of room for improvement still, this is just an initial release.