Hate the dry up idea as a game mechanic.  Although I do agree with your overall point that scarcity of resources is really the driving force of nations and right now, there is really no need to war against neighbors, as you have all the resources you need.  Should probably be more scarce or take more resources to produce things.

I'm hoping that the AI fixes will cause the enemy AI factions to kill my units more.  Maybe a resource management along with gold expenses would be helpful too?  But having the resources be used up will cause our game to go back into the dark ages as many of us like to play super long games.

That would be neat, but it might be a more difficult game mechanic to implement.  Not sure, I have no idea what is difficult to develop and what isn't.  On the surface, I wouldn't think that having the computer use boats would be difficult, but many games have shown that it is.

Imho it works great like it is now. I never felt I had an abundance of either metal or crystal, never "too much to use" in the mid-game or late-game if I had done my research in warfare (metal) or magic (crystals).

I think the system should stay as it is, as once you've amassed a stockpile, you now have a very good bargaining tool to use for diplomacy, assuming the others don't have the same stockpile. And diplomacy should be improved in Beta 2, which should cause us to re-evaluate this at that point.

Seriously?

Every game I've played both myself and all AI players have been super over-resourced. Everyone has unlimited everything it seems, so it isn't a powerful diplomatic too either. That's on all normal settings.

I do like seanw3's idea of ultra high resource cost stuff as well.

Basically I want a reason to give a damn about my resources, and I'm flabbergasted and a little miffed that you can but I can't.

I usually go for research that use the resources I have though, maybe that's why? Anyway, let's see how things develop in beta 2, where army units are hopefully more "viable" compared to heroes.

There should be equipment that uses metal and crystal right from the start.  Part of the problem is that you don't actually start using it until later in the game.  If metal gave you pointier spears or harder shields early on, you might care enough to build a mine before researching metal armor.  Hopefully there will be some basic magic items early on too.

In 0.77 I build 1 crystal mine and 1 scenic location so I can train Drakes and the like.  Anything more than that is a waste of money in location upkeep, at least until very late in the magic tech tree.

How about requiring units that need mettel/horses have a small amount of Metel/horse upkeep requirement.

That will make resorce nodes usfull threw out the full game not just at the start

you'll be using up your resources against the new AI

Ie using up all your X, and trading everything else to get more X (X = metal, crystals, or diplo capital. Possibly mounts)