I enjoyed the Battle Realms system of resource gathering. You had two infinite resources: rice and water - and you told your peasants to collect rice or collect water, and you could also tell them to water the rice to make it grow back faster.
You could also automate the training of units, which was the biggest plus of their system. If I'm micromanaging a battle, I don't want to have keep going back to the base, clicking on a building, and then clicking on a train unit icon.

I haven't played DoW or CoH so I don't know how those compare.