I’d rather be having bros autistically obsessing over supply lines and infrastructure than the ww2 borders of a fascist yugoslavia. Map painting games, city builders, and political sims all push the same dopamine button in the brain. You give a dude a map of earth and tell him to build communism on it and he will spend the next twenty four hours arguing with similar nerds in a forum about entirely fictional models of resource deposits in Africa being entirely unbalanced. Let’s focus the analytical mind towards coming up with highly unrealistic plans for managing the global economy than making war.
One step futher: something like Ender’s Game where they think they’re playing map games, but they’re actually doing real central planning.