Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Armour has to be stripped before any control lands, surfaces do more damage than swords, and the game explains neither. Act two is where under-levelled parties stop entirely.

Nothing threatens you for hours — and then the base you laid out at hour four becomes the thing you cannot fix at hour forty.

You do not lose fights here, you lose campaigns — and usually about three missions before you notice.

Hundreds of hours of interlocking systems with a mid-game crisis on a timer. Most losses happen fifty in-game years before anybody notices them.

The failure state is a confused kind of boredom — you will rule for two centuries before you work out what you were supposed to be doing.

Division templates, supply and production efficiency are the game, and none of them are on screen when you start. The front line is only ever a symptom.

The town is gone, so there is no bank of spare heroes to absorb a bad decision — a run is four people and every relationship between them is a mechanic.

A storyteller AI aims raids at whatever you are worst at, and mood is a second economy that collapses faster than the defensive one.

Orbital mechanics with no tutorial worth the name. It is endlessly patient about failure and completely unwilling to explain a delta-v budget.

No luck and no reflexes: every loss is a chess problem you were shown in full and got wrong anyway.