I enjoyed that part, but he could have done it in a 20 page short story.

I'm not sure if Liu Cixin is emblematic of Chinese science fiction, but the services of a more aggressive editor seem to be missing. Imho, it would have vastly improved the series, and possibly cut it down to a single volume.

The game theory parts of the book made me pretty annoyed personally. He's oversimplifying a problem, ignoring obvious compounding factors, and then proclaiming that it's the only possible solution and everybody else must have made the same flawed assumptions and be operating under the same principles.

And then of course everybody does operate under those principles and feel compelled to act irrationally as a result.

Because resources are limited the only solution is to blow up almost all of the resources to make sure nobody else gets them. The idea that there might be natural limits (even basic thermodynamic ones) to growth apparently never occurs to the author. It's kind of shocking how casual some unnamed alien species is about literally destroying the universe.