Resources and 'fall further' ideas

I've been playing Civ 4, fall further modmod. Just thinking about some of the concepts that would work well in elemental. I like the idea of unlocked terrain features, things like fruit as a trade good, improving health. But beyond that, I really liked the few potential choices with resources such as: keep sheep and gain +1 health/food or feed sheep to hungry giants and gain a giant unit. Even better was the ability to capture a spider, grow it into a giant spider and then put it to work in a city (sacrifice spider) making silk. Alchemy transforming copper to gold or the reverse... I also liked that evil corruption of terrain would warp the resources, turning horses into nightmares and things.

I would like to add that elemental could do alot more, creating resources from essence would be very nice. Or warp them with magic. It'd offset the problem of a poor starting location and add another element to the player.

I think one nice idea would be to have the choice between creating and choosing your new resource or spells that would work more randomly... adding something to your land, enemy land and unclaimed land. Perhaps an expensive spell/ritual/wonder adding new resources every 10 turns up to a maximum of n resources of that type. Vs an unlimited capacity to enhance your own land with essence, magical research and the technical research to be able to see and use the new features.

I'd also like to see different methods of claiming a resource.

Master of magic style drop a spirit on it to claim it, drop a more expensive hard to remove guardian spirit (claim with defensive bonus)

Perhaps some would be automatic, some require a building, some a unit, some a more expensive unit providing a permenant defense of resource.

E.g. Golem worker/slave/worker/expedition team... each could be placed on a coal seam/iron vein/mithril deposit... inside your borders the options could be:

1. to form a free caravan with trade route to nearest city, or not free if outside borders

2. build a building providing a steady income with setup costs and time,

3. build a defensive building/building has chance to resist pillaging or worker unit/defender gains defense and health bonus (more expensive option, harder to pillage),

4. magically enhanced building (further bonus to... defense? production? sight radius? setup time? your choice? dependent on faction/research)

5. Essence enhanced building, uses a small amount of essence (2.5?) to mark a location, providing a ring of culture and ownership, preventing any but hostile takeover and creating defenders bound to that location based on the strength of the owner at time of casting (could be upgraded with mana, or a mage visit, worker or caravan)

Anyway, this is all supposed to depend on the resource... fish, iron, fruit should all have a base rate of automatic collection scaling with city size, but should be easily surpassed by an outpost with a dedicated magically enhanced and defended mine.

Any thoughts? I know resources is being discussed all over atm so, thought I'd join in.