I've been experimenting with the new resource idea myself. Right now I'm trying it out on Elementium, basically the idea is to have the sovereign generate Elementium at a set rate, making them extra valuable, and Elementium resource units more viable. I'm running some tests to check if their children will end up generating said resources. If everything works out, I'll add Elementium to pioneer cost to see if it will do the trick. Will keep you all posted.

Quick update: The resource generation from sovereign does carry over to your children (of the same gender), and while it makes having children important, there are some loopholes that can be exploited (such as marrying the daughters of tarth/pariden/ceresa to get the most out of it). It's probably better to handle it as a single building per faction... if only the AI will build it, heh.

Second update: I tried the same using a 1 per faction building, made it cheap and assigned a high value for it, and got the AI to build the thing... yay! Right? Not really. What ended happening was that conquest becomes way OP. Taking the capital city of another player doubles the amount you generate, thus letting you build twice as much. It's like a super reward for rushing, which is bad IMO. At this point I'm thinking the sovereign/heir resource generation is the better choice since it makes them very valuable, that or throw the whole thing out the window.

Final update on this for anyone who still cares: I was an idiot, the easiest way to make it work and made sure that no one could abuse it was to put it as a faction trait. Now each faction generates one Elementium per turn and that is used as a control mechanic. Works like a charm.