In a lot of collect-and-build games nothing ever gets harder in the combat sense. What changes is how many intermediate steps sit between you and the next thing you want, and that is where the hours actually go.
You collect what is in front of you, then discover the blocker is three tiers down a branch you ignored. The fix is unglamorous: pick the target first and work the requirements backwards. Laying out the full material tree for a build is what stopped me stockpiling one resource while running dry on another.
Planning ahead also strips out the improvisation, and improvising with whatever you happened to pick up is a fair chunk of why these games are relaxing. I now only plan the one or two builds I actually care about and let the rest happen by accident.