Yes.
Do you know why most players choose to fight and kill the enemies? Because they know they are going to win. The game is rigged in favour of the PC, particularly in battle. It's not so much a matter of rules (even though the newer the edition, the more generous the death/dying rules) but a matter of assuming that the PCs MUST encounter killable monsters, and most of them should be EASY to kill so that you can have lots of encounters.
It's an extreme idea, but what if you start by default having the majority of the enemies be BETTER than the PCs in combat? If the players start learning that picking a fight is a real risk, they are going to change their strategy for the whole game. They are going to use other ways than violence first, to reach their ends. Like normal people do in real life...