One major source of that feeling of agency in AIW Classic is actually the pattern made in the map by a choice of global strategy. If you go archipelago, or find chokepoints and make clusters of protected systems, or all the various things like that, you get a different layout of your systems, and that layout contributes to what it feels like to attack and defend from that structure. Choosing which systems to take and which ones to neuter but leave in the AI's control and so on is closer for me to Minecraft-style 'block placement' in terms of the valid stylistic variations than e.g. turret layouts or ship loadouts, which are highly constrained by optimality considerations.
