Strategy games give you a neat way to think about trade‑offs and limits, and that’s useful for framing conservation questions, but real ecosystems don’t follow a preset set of rules or a single optimal solution. They’re messy, non‑linear, and full of stochastic events you can’t code into a simple algorithm. So you can borrow the idea of balancing short‑term gains with long‑term sustainability, but you have to replace the game’s neat math with empirical data, adaptive management, and an acceptance that sometimes the best you can do is to monitor and adjust rather than follow a fixed strategy.