Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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.

Not difficult so much as undocumented — everything that kills you was perfectly legible, in a menu you did not know existed.

Thermodynamics as a colony sim. The base that runs beautifully for forty cycles fails on the sixtieth because the heat had nowhere to go.

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

The rare strategy game that is also an execution test: the plan is worthless if your hands cannot run it at the pace it assumes. The campaign is a gentle front for that.

A MOBA played from behind the character, so half your abilities have to be aimed and the other half have to be aimed while something is aiming at you.