Originally Posted by GeneralMikeIII
I think I'm with wisefather on this one, especially for the ones he specified. It will go a lot further towards the settlement specialization thing CA is trying to do with the cities/castles thing. I kinda liked how they did the iron in M1, but I don't think there were enough places to get iron (there were only 9 provinces on the whole map, IIRC, and 3 or 4 of them were concentrated in Spain). I liked the thing in M1 where you had certain provinces you would go for (Switzerland, iron provinces, Toulouse, etc.). It did add another layer of strategy.
What might be cool is if you could transport your resources, simulating local trade. If for example there is a lot of stone in Wales, but you want to have your tough defenses in Wessex or Flanders, you could select to trade the resource to that settlement, so Wales loses the bonus and the other one gains it. Or trade iron to Switzerland and get uber-super pikemen. I didn't like how they did it in CIV because you could have 25 cities or more all drawing off the same single iron deposit, and I just don't see that as very realistic. And with the trade thing, the player will have some control over it, but you need to have the province to trade the resource, so it is still important to get those resource provinces, even if the resource is just about useless in the province it is originally in.
Then there is an added military strategy to the game in disrupting trade routes by taking linking provinces (sorta like in RISK)...
:goes to investigate how hard it would be to mod this in: