You should check out Dirt Rally 1 and 2 (not Dirt 1 and 2, they're different) if you liked the older Colin McCrae Rally games but hated the transformation into Monster Energy sponsored arcade racers when they dropped the Colin McCrae branding - they're a return back to the semi realistic simcade style and are actually really good.
I also highly recommend everything made by Zachtronics games (the dev of Opus Magnum) - also try Shenzhen IO if you want to go further into the "it's just programming with more concrete goals" style of puzzle game, or Infinifactory if you want something that still has the same design optimization feel but feels a bit less like your day job.
I don't know if you ever played the Age of Wonders series back in the day, but I recommend those as something along the lines of HOMM, for the more recent titles Age of Wonders 3 seems to be well received, but the sci fi spinoff Planetfall has less positive reception.
I also don't know if you were ever in to business sim games, but Cities Skylines, Planet Zoo and Planet Coaster are all worthy successors to Sim City, Zoo Tycoon and Rollercoaster Tycoon respectively. Transport Fever is also a good Railroad Tycoon esque game, although if you were heavily into the latter I don't know if it will quite feel the same.
I find this third party steam search tool very useful for finding games: https://www.lorenzostanco.com/lab/steam/store/ - type in a mix of genre tags you're interested in, specify > about 50 user reviews, sort by user rating. If the results look a bit too low budget to you bump the minimum user rating.
EDIT: Oh and I forgot Factorio. Although maybe stay away from that one if you value your free time... it might suck you in hard.