I did the perfectly reasonable thing of writing a 2600-word reply, but hey, at least I had the common decency of posting it on pastebin instead of hijacking the thread with a wall of text of questionable relevance, since, admittedly, it served me as an indulgence at least as much as, if not more than, it furthers any real discussion (the criteria for which, in this context, I honestly cannot quite define). For added irritation of the nitpicking, I suggest using a text-to-speech synthesiser, the more unnatural and stilted-sounding the cadence of which, the better. Or, read it in, say, Sir Gregory Holm's (of The Council) voice in your mind.

TL;DR: Sometimes it's arguably preferable to abide by the Spirit of the Law, as opposed to the Letter of the Law, especially in the present context of an artistic performance (as opposed to a quantifiable, measurable, right/wrong, true/false "performance" such as solving an equation) that the CKII series is. Secondarily, a friendly reminder that (relevantly, video-, but also generally) games are ultimately "playing pretend" just the same as the "games" we "play" as children, i.e. we are free, and it is, at least occasionally, worthwhile, to evaluate them, and what we do in them, by much wider criteria than simply measuring "the rate of optimisation” and quantified outcomes.