Point is, some complete fool who has a strategy guide, and follows things by the book could easily beat a genius who tries to figure things out himself.
It doesn't work like that at all in RTS games. Yeah, the genius will lose the first game as he figures out which unit does what, but the second game is his.
Have you ever played a RTS multiplayer?
In Stronghold, some kid just speed-clicked, build a huge field of apple farms, created a lot of apples, sold them all, bought weapons, and sent a few hundred swordsmen to my place before I figure out WTF he was doing. It didn't matter that I had a nice fort going, he could just spam my fort by manipulating that apple production flaw. And he claims that there's people who could do that faster.
In major RTSes.. AoE, Starcraft, Warcraft, C&C (especially Generals!), if you lag a little (i.e. THINK), your enemy will have a strong production stream going while you're trying to figure out which units are best to counter his. As smart as you are, the only thing you need to know in winning, is how to get your production up the fastest (from spoilers, likely), the best unit combos, and instinctively know the enemy's weakness.
Battle for Wesnoth involves a fair bit of strategy. (It's free, to boot.) The Total War series probably too.
Total War's strategies seem a bit simple to me.. because your always playing against the dumb AI. I mean it's nice, I've done some pretty sweet maneuvers and bluffs with it, but a bit limited.
I'm going to try out some of the other games mentioned, though