A lot of it is specific, but it's not like chess and civ are completely disjunct either. There is some significant overlap between some of the thought processes

A lot of it is specific, but it's not like chess and civ are completely disjunct either. There is some significant overlap between some of the thought processes involved. They both have minimax game trees, though civ obviously has a much bigger branching factor so you have to be a lot fuzzier about it. But I'd argue that just having played a lot of chess with a more managable branching factor makes it easier to make the meta decision of how to think about these games.