I have not found this to be the case. I am usually always strapped for metal and crystal at every point in the game. Many starting positions don't have access to them, so they have to expand early or conquer a rival to get them. I like having lots of resources on the map that are only taken by outposts. The AI and I can then use guerrilla warfare to win a war. I build special units to skirt around cities and take out resources.

I was thinking there should be buildings that require crystal and metal to build, much like Blacksmith, only at a real cost. It should cost at least 100 metal or 1 metal per turn to build this sort of thing. This could tie into having several buildings that require a resource connected to the tech tree option. A research building that uses crystal would be logical. The Warfare tree should have some buildings that reward a player for choosing a city with high materials.

The Choice the devs need to make is do we want to have Civics be the main tech tree? The others seem like specializations of that tree since they require Civic techs, but no Civic techs require them. I would prefer totally separate trees that focus on specializing a resource and an overarching strategy. As long as they pick one and don't try to do both at the same time.

And I also like the mana flow. There are some really nice spells that will suck 2000 mana dry, but give your heroes some awesome powers. This is as it should be.

I ran into 3 broken quests. Successfully completed maybe another 3. Found them tedious. I didn't research the higher tech quest unlocks until I had out-leveled the quests. That research time was much more valuable spent elsewhere.

Magic was OK for the most part. Fireball was kinda useless because of the long wait until you can cast. Most things were dead before I could use it. Some of the level 5 spells are neat but it takes so long to get them. Having numerous tiny icons available in combat was not so fun. Which tiny icon goes with which spell? Then in combat, I found myself using the same spells over and over.

I definitely liked collecting loot and trading it around between my numerous champions. Leveling champions is fruitful work. Getting a new tech, then designing an improved unit and using them in combat. Building massive high-tech DEADLY armies is excellent.

Continued:

Improving the Military Tech Tree

Since metal is the official military unit resource now the techs to unlock mines and improve their output should probably be on the military tree not the civilization one. Crystal techs are already found in the magic tree so why not metal.

Military tech should broken down into two different tracks, the metal and equipment one and a conquest one. While players who are peaceful will always have a reason to get more equipment techs they would not really benefit from the conquest track.

The new conquest military track would make players better at supporting larger armies and playing aggressive conquer the world game styles. On it would be techs like the before mentioned ability to reduce unit upkeep. It also would allow garrisoned units to reduce unrest and provide buildings that reduce unrest. The command post would be moved to this tree because it allows mass produced units to be more effective. Other techs that allow you to mass produce higher quality units would be on this track as well. You could also add techs that allows players to pillage cities and enemy armies for money and tech. If your plan is to fight other players then this should be the tech track for you.

Improving Unrest

To help prevent players who haven't researched conquest tech, and say focused on civilization research, from going on sudden massive conquest sprees, and to prevent snowballing conquered cities should suffer a small permanent unrest penalty and a larger temporary one. If unrest is high enough in a city it should rebel against it's captures and return to its previous owner or turn neutral. If the city is occupied however then after a fairly random amount of time the occupiers would be attacked by militia and peons equal to the city level, possibly led by a special champion called a Insurgent. If the rebels are defeated then the city would lose the temporary unrest penalty. If the garrison is obviously much more powerful the the rebels then the rebels wouldn't show up. This mechanic would force players to properly garrison cities after conquest and not just conquer city after city. Unrest could also increase the more cities you have.

Continued:

Improving the Civics Tech Tree

Split the civics tree into two tracks like the military tree, a main one and a peace/tall one. The main track or branch would include the production, military tie in, research, diplo capital, and half the food techs. This would be the track that players would pretty much always go down because it contains all the techs you need no matter what your strategy.

The other track would be the Tall or Peaceful track. It would be for players who are planning on winning without conquest and without a lot of cities. It would boost Prestige, treaties, trade, and contain the other half of the food techs. It could also contain techs that upgrade only the capital or provide other benefits to small kingdoms. The prestige would allow the cities to grow their population and borders faster. If your planning on doing a lot of conquering this branch wouldn't help you much.

Improving the Magic Tree

The Magic tree could be divided into 3 branches. The first would contain the magical equipment and crystal techs. The second would contain the shard, mana, and spell techs. The final third one would contain the quest and champion techs. Only players who have a lot of crystal would be going down the first branch. Only players going for a very magic heavy strategy and the spell of making would go down the second. The third would be for players who want to win via a quest victory.

By dividing the tech trees like this we can allow players to pick different tech strategies depending on their starting resources and their play style. Thus every game will be different and players will be more invested in building cities and researching tech.

This is a really important flaw in the current tech tree. We should not just be unlocking heavier and heavier armor, even at the start we should be making choices between armors. Should we tech straight to chainmail or unlock a heavy armor side tech (hide/scale/splint). Same thing applies to weapons, we should be making choices between going down the tech tree or offshoot technologies.

Loved this idea as well, what would really be awesome is if you included some anti unrest abilities for conquered cities in the military tree. So that people that didn't tech in the conquest tree would have a hard time holding cities.

Agree with all your suggestions for splitting the tech trees. Didn't Frogboy say something about them splitting?

I don't think the problem is resources flowing too quickly, I think it is a side effect of the other problems which is that we have to unlock everything to unlock even the most basic things : basically, most of my games are over before I even have any use for metal, because I typically raze my first opponent with speamen and the second with shortbowmen (on hard). I could produce metal weapons, but I don't because they suck when compared to spears (which is still another problem that has nothing to do with metal being too easy to come by).

For the exact same reason, I don't have any use for crystal, because I only get interesting crystal techs when I am in the mopping up phase (ie : I know I have won, but I still have to conquer the whole map...). 

Another problem with a strong side effect on the need for ressource is that taxation is really punishing, so until you get enough gold from questing to pay for your troop upkeep, it is really stupid to build too many of them, so you don't use much metal ever before you can take on enough lairs on a short amount of time. 

Only when all of these problems are addressed (ie punishing taxation slider, nothing to do with techs, armor piercing tech requiring no metal),  will we really be able to tell wether the ressources flow too freely or not.

Your point is a good one. There is a real dearth of buildings for cities to build early game and my cities spend at least half their time doing nothing. Making mines, shards etc start out producing less but able to be beefed up with buildings would help flesh out the currently anaemic city building aspect of FE. (I think city building needs more help than that, but it would be a good start!)