Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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.

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

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.

It barely tests your hands at all; it tests whether you can walk away from a dungeon you have already paid for.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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