The timeless Warcraft II is about as complex as I like to deal with. Starship Troopers, however, seemed ready to give me exactly what I wanted. The game puts you in command of only a few squads of troops at a time, and never even deals with resources or building structures. It's all about combat. This may disappoint many fans of the genre, but it gave me hope.
Simplification is often a wonderful thing.
The problem is, after you bring the game back to basics like the developers do here, you need to make those basics as flawless as possible. Unfortunately, in Starship Troopers you always get the feeling that something is missing. It happens before you even install the game. If it's really thick, you're screwed. The trick was, the small manual didn't mean the game was extremely simple, it just meant they weren't going to tell me how to play it.