RTS games with the emphasis on the Strategy part

i grew up on real time strategy games but i noticed with quite a few of them there is not that much emphasis on the actual strategy most of the time it boils down to building and researching as fast as possible to try an overrun the enemy.

First time i remember using strategy and it worked was playing this game cossacks and using the terrain and the height to my advantage a  squad of riflemen took out a much larger squad because they could shoot further.

Now there are more strategic games such as total war series, company of heroes etc.

I would love to hear from people stories about when strategy paid off and the perhaps more traditional resource collecting games that have a fair amount of strategy rather then base rushing.