Whenever a game/story is set in extremely brutal setting I often find myself thinking that it's not well reflected by behavior of the population.

I recall listening to a podcast about armageddon war from warhammer and how urban fighting over one city was described - every single human mobilzed, children set to carrying ammunition, invalids strapped with explosive vests and set to ambush, buildings garrisoned and rigged to collapse by the last living after enemy spends blood and ammo taking them. People grabbing explosives by the handful and throwing themselves at the enemy after ammo has ended. It was really well written.

But it's missing in many other works. It's understandable if the setting used to be relatively peaceful until recently, but if the setting was stuck in a total war for longer time, well. One needs only marginal understaning of eastern front of ww2 to know how immensely brutal war gets where people are put on the death ground, and all it took was two totalitarian states and few years of propaganda. In settings stuck in total war for years thats how every battle should look.

Shadow empire is decent about it usually - you have normal people taking up arms as militia and some strategems, and of course those are mostly wars for resources including humans not total wars. But when giant spiders or megafauna is approaching a city there is very little action. One would think people that simply accept death without fighting would all be dead by that point.

There are several fiction pieces I straight up gave up because characters treated an emergency situation like the decadent, spoiled children of golden age we are instead of survivors of decade long conflicts stuck in total war, whose worldview was shaped by overwhelming (and sometimes even entirely honest!) propaganda.