I thought of another one, Railroad Pioneer.
It's like your countless other railroad tycoon games, except not at all (I wonder why there's so little innovation in terms of mechanics and straying from the formula in this genre). Came out in the mid 2000's iirc, you can get it on Steam too, but it's not made for modern systems and is pretty much unplayable.
Anyways, as the name might suggest its set in the pioneering days of the US and you're one of the go-getters that are in the race to complete the big east-west rail across the US. So, you start each scenario at the eastern part of the map, you can see a few of the big cities but everything else is covered in fog of war. So you have your first deviation from the norm, you gotta explore the map to find shit like optimal routes or new resource deposits and cities. You do this exploring by recruiting expeditions from cities, and these expeditions cost upkeep but they also don't last forever, they can also die if they're not properly equipped. You equip them by adding in different specialists, so a native translator might help deal with any tribe events you run into, a gunslinger might help against bandits and a balloonist can literally lift them up and over mountains (but is stupidly expensive too).
Then there's the RPG elements involving trains, where you can customize them to an extent and they gain xp of sorts which can be spent on various upgrades like speed or reliability, making it so that sticking to an older and tested design might be cheaper than buying something new as soon as its available.
So yeah, those handful of features were so damn cool and refreshing to see in this type of game, it's a damn shame we don't (at least to my knowledge) never got anything similar afterwards