One of the hardest parts about creating a strategy game is giving something to two of your most important players: the brand new player, and the old veteran. Reflecting on uber-popular real-time-strategy (RTS) games like Starcraft, Warcraft or Red Alert, it gave a ton of replayability simply on the fact that you could optimize per second. It was great to match your playbook against someone else's, and adjust accordingly. I could spend years crafting my playbook and learning even quirks of the software itself like glitches or exploits.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.pbbg.com/feature-review-player-levels-content-gating/