I suppose what I meant with Civ 6 having too many clicks was specifically that Civ 6 has too many unnecessary clicks. Any junior programmer could do better with basic issues with the Civ 6 UI, including things like sorting cities by yield, choosing production for multiple cities at once, choosing cities to continue to generate certain units until told to stop. You know, things that Civ 4 did. Civ 4's UI wasn't even perfect either, but Civ 6 and Civ 5 are a regression compared to what Civ 4 offered.
For me, the unnecessary clicks are the ones that are needed to advance the game, but don't relate to interesting decisions. For which there are a lot after the early game.
Which is a bit ironic, because Ed Beach made it clear that one of his objectives for Civ 6 was to have all the decisions be interesting ones. He was opposed to automated scouting (and, I wouldn't be surprised, production queues), because instead he wanted the decision of where to explore to be an interesting one for the player. I think he was on the right track with that objective, but the end product has fallen short. In large part, that may be because an interesting decision for one player is a boring one for another. So you almost need more automation, not less, to recognize that different players will want to hand over different decisions for the game to make for them.
With some creativity, that could be handled in a way that makes it easy for a player to move in or out of the decision making process. Take trade, for example. Instead of flogging a resource to every AI every 30 turns, perhaps you could have a "Manage Trade" screen where you flag what items you want to trade, and which you're willing to trade, or identity what you want to trade for. Maybe even who you're willing to trade with and who you aren't. Then every 30 turns, your advisors bring you the best trade they're able to negotiate, and you accept it, or tell them "not yet" and they come back with another offer next turn, or you say "Let me get involved." This way you can shut off (if you want) the useless AI trade offers, which you'll never want to take without checking around first (unless you can't be bothered to check around, and just want to get on with the game).
Spies, similarly, could be flagged for defence, offence, select who you do or don't want to target, what types of missions you want your spies to run, etc. Then you can forget them, and have their missions just roll over to the next highest priority as completed. Or you can get involved micro-managing them if you want. Right now your choice is to have no spies at all or micro-manage, right down to the inane renewal every 8 turns of the Listening Post and Anti-Spy missions. (Like, seriously? Can't those just be "these are your orders until told otherwise"?)
