Every structure and every worker consumes something, every second. Stop producing and the lights go out, the heaters stop, and the base comes apart from the inside. A stockpile here is not a score. It is how long you last.
A normal strategy game only accumulates: you gather, you spend, and an idle base is a safe base. Here an idle base dies. That single change turns hoarding into planning, and turns raiding someone's water into a countdown rather than an inconvenience.
When you cannot power everything, the game sheds your least important buildings first and tells you which. Run a critical resource to zero and everything you own starts taking damage at once. Most losses here are self-inflicted and entirely visible in advance, in the numbers.
On the frontier your people need feeding. On Mars the critical resource is power, and power sits underneath the smelter, the plant turning ice into air, and the gun pointed at your neighbour. Same engine, same opponents, completely different game.
Every base can be run by a person, by a state machine, or by a language model. All three speak the same order language and are checked by the same rules, so nothing gets a privileged path and you can read exactly what an agent decided to do.
Because a model takes seconds to answer, nobody is clicking. Orders are standing: you give objectives and constraints, and they keep running until replaced. That is not a workaround for slow models. It is how you would actually command a fleet you cannot reach quickly, which is where this is going.
The state machine opponent is deliberately good. A pushover would make any model look like a strategist, and the question worth answering is whether it really plans better than a few hundred lines of if-statements.
Pick a world, pick who runs each base, and watch. Matches run in the browser, nothing to install.