Man it's not foreseeing if you're just saying what we've all been arguing! The heuristics we use to navigate the world arose from an ateleological existence game, and it's hard to get those blindly evolved local heuristics to work for our new, 'rational', teleological mode of global reasoning. You're trying to argue against something by restating it. All we can do is keep saying 'yes, exactly!'
So laying out the strategies:
UEF - be peaceful and exist on what's given in the environment
GTVA - eat the peaceful by manipulating the environment
Shivans - be the environment?
The Shivans are such a massive entity that their mere existence shapes how everyone else reacts.
On a past note about local/global strategies: if the Shivan strategy truly is the optimal global strategy for existence, then does that imply the most effective strategy at winning the existence game is to exist on an unprecedentedly large scale? It almost feels like we're saying to be the biggest winner, you have to be the biggest winner.
I think of the Shivans as an environment, yeah! But not just a system of systems interacting, like weather or tectonics. Something much more dangerous.
To borrow more of your language, I think of the Shivans as a function. A transform. It accepts input and produces, eventually, a response. What input?
Exactly the kind of stable existence game equilibrium tactics you talked about earlier. And the output is the devastation of that tactic. The Shivans are whatever network occupies the space between.
Imagine a point in the game space so unstable that when it encounters a stable equilibrium it immediately diverges wildly - and does so in a way that eventually selects for a counterstrategy.
It's not the kind of super smart chess mind I was talking about earlier. Rather, it's a function intrinsically hostile to that mind, one that eats the enemy's local victories and transforms them into global defeats. It can fight anything because it has no internal structure to predict and destroy: only engines for transforming input into radically divergent behaviors that eventually produce a winning tactic.
Note that this crazy anti-chessmaster function may of course produce chessmasters from its sea of possibilities. They'll be effective at optimizing force locally, but may create fragility by over optimizing and becoming predictable. In BP these are called anima. They recruit elements from the totipotent base state to satisfy their local objectives, and they last until something takes them out.
And yes - you have to be huge to do this. Ridiculously so. It's such a locally wasteful tactic that you have to be able to absorb galaxies and millennia of losses in the name of ultimate victory.
The Shivans have given up on the Princess Bride problem that haunts chessmasters: if you do this, I do that! But you know I know, so you'll do THAT, so I must do THIS, but you know I know you know...
They've stepped back and said, ok, how do we take the limit of this problem and become the victor at infinity? How do we become a function that transforms strategies into counterstrategies?
In a sense the Shivans are very lazy. They ask you to work very hard to figure them out, or to throw all your strength at them, or whatever, man, it's all cool with us. They outsource the job of figuring out your weaknesses to you! They're just exceptionally good, in the long run, at listening. They'll grow the organs they need to kill you once you've made it clear what those should be.
There's a reason BP said the Shivans were calculated, not made. Though that means a few things.