There were games that went all or mostly in on not being a clickfest for resource management - Myth, Ground Control off the top of my head, Total Annihiliation had a different model for resources. My personal preference was for these over Starcraft/Warcraft in multiplayer, but it was nice to have so many options.

I always felt like I was cheating when I cheesed the AI to defeat it. But then I realized that this in many games they hit you with a large number of dumb mobs because one isn’t a challenge.

You could do the same thing to a human opponent in some of those games, or they to you, so in practice you had to micromanage some things like fights in order to kite or retreat effectively.

When I got out of college I had a brief fantasy of trying to consult doing game AI but the whole field cratered and I had no idea if I actually had an aptitude for it, and I got busy doing other kinds of “serious” work.