Black and White stands as one of my favorite games of all time for this reason. I'd argue it was the pinnacle of this behavior as far as Molyneux's games go because of the creature. It had a sophisticated AI that enabled it to actually be taught what was good and what was bad through experience. If it ate a villager you smacked it around and it'd learn it shouldn't do that. If it helped water your crops then you'd rub its belly and it'd know to do more of that.

It was especially interesting because in order to train the creature what behavior was or wasn't desired you had to catch them in the act doing that thing. Since the creature was an independent actor who you could only influence, you had to rely on the randomness of the AI to do certain things so you could teach them what was good and what was bad. E.g. you can't teach it eating villagers is bad unless you catch them in the act and smack them around. Such a shame they almost completely did away with that teaching-through-doing part of creature-training in favor of simplifying down the creatures behaviors to basically sliders like "good vs bad" and "friendly vs aggressive" in BW2. Still waiting on a proper spiritual successor to BW1... what a brilliant game.

No surprise the guy who made it went on to create this little company called DeepMind...

The first Populous game did that too. It's very simplistic in Populous, though - it's mostly about flattening terrain so they can build or calling them to battle and helping them by smiting your opponents in various ways, and their actions are similarly basic. Then again given the machines it ran on, it's not unsurprising.

I'm missing Dungeon Keeper 1&2 on that list :)

The attempt to manage a dungeon and direct all your minions at a certain goal, compined with the idea to automate your defence (through traps and alarms) somehow evoked a similar joy to programming for me. It's especally ironic on how many misbehaviors of the creature agents I tried by locking (ha!) doors in front of them.

Also, the general game style (aesthetics, soundtrack and the narrator) remains unmatched to this day.

Was going to mention Dungeon Keeper in this thread, another one of Molyneux's masterpieces, and probably the most relevant comparison to Dwarf Fortress IMO.

Similarly to DF, you just allocate tiles to be excavated, and can paint allocations on rooms, but never issue direct orders to minions. (Though you can possess them and take a first-person perspective, which is an interesting twist).