The global resouces would be fine if unit production had more building dependence.  Even something as simple as requiring a blacksmith before allowing the training of units with armor and weapons would solve the many of the problems.  I'm not sure adding complex, caravan related math (I would enjoy it, but there are many who wouldn't) is the answer.

Personally I would like to see more of the "unlockable resources."  For example, requiring a mining tech before gold and iron can be seen (or have "rich gold" sites unlock with a 2x bonus).  It helps prevent resource-squatting, and forces players to change their play style as new realities arise.  Of course, the only way this works is if city-spamming is impossible, which I think can be done by creating more aggresive, region specific AI mobs that have to be cleared from an area before expansion can take place.  When it takes resources and real effort to create and maintain a city, there is less incentive to randomly build cities.  Just my 2 cents of course.

In the betas you had to build a structure ("training grounds" or something) before you could train units. They removed it because it made the early game quite boring. I think that was the right thing to do. 

One idea that I had on this matter was if a city's resources start off as non-global, until you connect up that city to your kingdom-wide trade network with a caravan. So long as the caravan continued to trade back and forth between the city and the rest of your kingdom, the resources would be globally available. But if the caravan gets destroyed by a monster, the city gets cut off again. This forces you to expand more wisely than the current game does, since you have to either found your cities closely to each other so that caravans are never threatened, or spend a lot of resources on armies to guard your long caravan routes, or else settle for having distant outpost cities that must try to be self-sufficient. Caravans could automatically respawn at the source city if they are destroyed, and city would not count as connected again until the caravan had successfully made a trip there and back again. In this way, there would hopefully be no micro, but would also add a certain strategic element to expansion and resource management. Making caravans useful in this way would also mean that you can get rid of the silly and unbalanced stacking +food bonus.

Of course, the downside to this idea is that foreign caravans would have to have another use, and although it would not be difficult to think up an interesting use for them, having two separate uses for caravans might be unnecessarily complicated and confusing.

I'd rather not go to localized resources.  I can't imagine any way to do this without adding more micromanagement than I want to deal with.  I would rather see buildings which enable higher level units to be built, but this would have to be done carefully, as it's hard enough to build buildings while still leaving room for enough houses to allow the town to level up.

Localized resources, being "globalized" with roads and caravans I'd like to see.  The easist way would be to have resources from another city globalized or instantly accessible if they are connected by roads with an active caravan.  With more complexity, there would be a gradual drift of resources along caravan routes, balancing through the different cities and diffusing toward the ones that consume the resources the fastest.  But I'd like to see a return to local resources at the core (except for gildars, and when implemented, essence or mana).

Seems to me what we now have regarding the global pools reduces strategic depth as it's a quick and easy no-brainer system which decreases decision-making.

It does seem to water down strategy. Right now I am playing Age of Wonders SM and I think some basic economy tactics can be gleaned from that game. Simple yet strategic.

What if global resources gained from cities were diluted the further away they were from your capital? The cities far off had to set up independent economic structures or diplomatic connections? Not sure if it would change anything. Might help city spam atleast

Or what if you didn't start out with global resources but was something you researched, or gained through diplomacy or something. But it would be if you decided to go a more diplomatic/economic victory. Start of locally but could through research begin to attach 1 or two cities into the global pool eventually including all your cities. But perhaps they atleast need to be connected by a caravan first before even begining tot have global resources

"Localized tracking" means that each city keeps track of what it produces.

Please bear in mind, what we had in 1G was not at all like local resources in Civilization (which also has global resources of Iron, Coal, Gold, etc), but we were able to setup trade routes between cities. This trade was effectively a "bonus" in production, it didn't cut out what you had in the first city. Also, the closer you were to a city or fewer connections the more of a bonus you got on the trade route. It was I thought, a pretty good implementation of what the majority of players had asked for in "internal debates made external" official stardock thread. It needed fine-tuning and tweaking, but I was honestly enjoying setting up trade empires at that point of the game (tactical battles and spells were not in yet). Also, because resources were local the placement of your cities was critical and it was fun to explore not an empty world but one that had various interesting resources to find.

Stardock was so determined that we were going to like it, that they never bothered testing or asking if any of us actually did.

If so, I was wrong in my above post, and the localized tracking number is not just "...a number on a city screen in our current setup..." as I said.

Thanks for the explanation/correction   

Hmm, I guess you could say so in that it tracks what is in the city yes. Previously what a city produced there stayed there and there wasn't a "global pool".

There wasn't any pool in the old economy system. Each city produced a certain amount of resources and they were used or they were lost (amounts were higher so this wasn't a problem). Without the "global pool" of materials you didn't need them to produce a unit. You could produce "Uber knights of doom" in every city if you had the gold and population required, and the materials you had determined the speed at which they were built like in civilization. In addition the trade routes meant that if you built one spectacular "industrial town" properly position in your kingdom/empire the bonus effect from trade routes could make all the other cities produce decently as well.

Yea it made the early game boring becuase it cost 100 gildar! Things are gonna be slow when your only way to produce units is one of the most expensive buildings in the game and your expected to buy it starting out. Also units use to cost a LOT more as well, if I remember correctly. I will admit the money did also flow a bit better back in those days as well, but not that much better that you could easily drop a few hundred just to let all your starting cities train units. If they had lowered the price of getting that training building then yea it would of been good.

Also what happen to buildings like the Siege factory and Archery range that were suppose to "allow" you to build units of that type? That would of been a great way to restrict people from simply building whatever at brand new cities. It's funny they took both of those buildings out before they added siege units and archers to the game.

I feel like they caved into a lot of pressure before everything was in so people could see how it all fit together. And some things were fine they just needed better balance like cheaper training grounds. There are a few other buildings that it's like WTH happen to them as well.