Silly gamer. These are affects of the current build. You will get your iron when you finish your vegetables.

No, but you should be able to extract, say, one quarter of the iron per turn out of a hill that you can from a mine.

It would allow you to build basic things like weapons, but not provide enough for the metal-intensive armors.   The truth is, iron is relatively plentiful naturally...and it's just an arbitrary metal in game a the moment.  It could be copper/tin/lead/some strange alloy. 

I'd second the ability to use hills for iron, but make it at a much reduced rate.  Kinda like there's gold mines in the game now, but you don't need them for gold, lumber yards in forests but you don't need them for materials.  Let there be a way to get a slow trickle of metal that isn't 100% crippling, but slower than you'd like.

 Edit: Since I quit writing for a living, I seem to be repeating the same series of words.  Therefore, I had to edit this post and remove a few repetitive redundancies to prevent people from seeing two copies of the same thing immediately next to each other.

I like the way this one thinks..... efficient you are..

Even if they have you outgunned (because of their iron), just user your spearmen to keep them busy while you cook up a nice tropical thunderstorm and fry everyone involved.  After all, their weapons and armor are probably highly conductive...  Since your guys have, essentially, wooden sticks some of them might even live. 

/shrug

One quarter sounds like a good rate to me. As I posted above the option to build in a swamp/bog to collect bog iron (a common practice for a long time I might add) with maybe the same rate or slower.

The current setup just seems so arbitrary concerning resources.  I mean why are we allowed to build leather armor shouldn't there be a requirement to have a tile with cattle or something to get the leather? 

Thanks.  Yes that is the idea those certain resources (iron mines, horses, cattle farms, etc.) should just reduce the costs of things, and provide huge bonuses to your city for having them.   The way it is now feels like a half-assed RTS resource game.

MoM was elegant in that it didn't require you to have an iron mine to build units beyond spear or bow.  The iron mine gave a 10% bonus to production which could be huge depending on the location and the size of your city.  Elemental should not care about common resources so much except in these special cases where they provide a large bonus to the city it is placed next too (reduce unit costs, faster build times, maybe a few better items [for instance the inclusion of an iron mine in a city could yield a better sword that your heroes can buy than a city that doesn't have one], etc.)

Meh, I'm not as it just speaks of some kind of RTS rush which is lame.  You should build spearman because a balanced army that gives appropriate bonuses for combined arms and that spears are good against other kinds of units.

Yeah there that too.  If you are keeping track of one type of common resource then you should be keeping track of other ones such as the aforementioned leather.  What about lumber?  Why isn't it required to stockpile to build wooden weapons aside from say the most simplest of clubs?

I agree, iron deposits and other special but common resource tiles should be there because they represent a huge deposit that offers a significant bonus to the city [and through that your kingdom] and not because it is just arbitrarily required.