When I Play Strategy Games...

I just can't help it. Almost inevitably, when I play strategy games, I
end up using the same tactics.

Not every strategy game. It doesn't work so well in classic hex-based
wargames, or squad-based tactics. But in real-time games or 4x? It's
almost always the same thing.

Build up my base, expand my borders, don't let anyone in, then slowly
grind down the bad-guys until they've one city or planet or base left.

Then I just stop. I surround their redoubt with an undefeatable army,
and go off to do my thing. Usually that is building up my own
civilization to as close to utopia as I can get it. I get all the
upgrades, I turn my cities or bases into works of art. I scrap the
army (except for the units warding the enemy base, of course) and
focus on peaceful pursuits.

A part of me hopes the bad guys will eventually see the error of their
ways and. Maybe they'll stop constantly sending the few meager troops
their reduced civilization can still produce to inevitable death when
they smash into the quarantine zone I've created around them. Maybe
they'll instead offer to join my empire instead. It never happens, of
course. But I'm hopeful.

Eventually, I give up on the game just because I run out of things to
do. I COULD win the game quite easily by moving my units into the bad
guy's tiny city, but I don't want to win that way. I don't even really
want to win any other way, whether through science or diplomacy or
whatever. I don't want to destroy or dominate my foes. I just want
them to stop being assholes with guns.

Maybe I'm Canadian?

Anyway, eventually I just turn the game off. Or I'll just start a new
campaign, but I know it'll just end the same way: with me ruling the
world and the few diehard opponents stuck in tiny isolated communities
fruitlessly raging at the status quo.

I try playing in different styles; I really do. Sometimes I'm even
successful at it. But even at my most aggressive, still my tactics are
tainted with the idea that maybe if I just push them back a bit, let
them know that it's a bad idea to keep testing my lines, the bad guys
will inevitably conclude there is a better alternative than standing
in the way of my conquering the world.

It'd make for a boring game if they did, though.