I find it kind of comical to see people getting all worked up over such a trivial issue. Who cares whether the turns are labelled by dates or numbers? It's 0.001% of the game experience.

For those who argue that turns without dates is not "historical", I find that argument utterly ludicrous. What is not historical now is that armies - heck, even agents - take literally decades to march from one side of the map to the other.

Simply relabelling the turns by number would not be my ideal solution to this problem, by a long chalk, but it's certainly no less unrealistic than having annual or biannual turns where armies only get to march a few miles and fight a single battle. How long did it take Alexander to conquer the world again? Oh, that's right, about 12 years, including long periods of diplomatic consolidation between military campaigns. Try doing that in RTW.