tsanderdev

For inspiration, Dwarf Fortress for example likely kills you at some point regardless of how good you are, and it's still fun.

I don't think you can make a slow downward spiral fun though, in DF it's usually pretty sudden events that overpower you. When you can already see your end coming, why continue playing?

An idea to counteract that would effectively be "I'm going to 4X even harder", conquering fresh new exploitable land from preservative empires. Then it's a question of if you can keep that momentum going until you win or will you collapse before that. The uncertainty means it's worth following through.

For question 3, I think it depends on player preference. For example I'm relatively happy playing a small empire with inwards economy focus in stellaris. And building up a federation is also interesting to me.

What languages have actual formal specifications with formally verified compilers anyways?

That's also not what you usually mean with "it doesn't mean anything" btw.

The meaning for a language without a spec is defined by the reference implementation. And it may very well be the case that semantics change in unpredictable or non-obvious ways on a compiler version change. But so long as the compiler itself doesn't have memory unsafety or race conditions, the translation is within a range of possibilities. The fact you can't easily enumerate the possibilities or determine them without compiling doesn't change that.

Golang programs - quite literally - had no defined meaning prior to Zhao's work that was published just two years ago.

You don't need a formal spec if your compiler is the only one. The compiler source code is a spec in itself, just not very human-readable.