Well, that's good, but.. I still see a problem with having hundreds of metal stockpiled, the technology necessary to make all this awesome plate armor and longswords and such, able to train a platoon infantry wearing about 60 pounds of iron each - and yet my sovereign's running around in the leather he started with, because there's no way to outfit him with the same equipment I can give to new units. Having new armor available for gold in a shop is better than not having it at all, but really, can't there be a way to equip my sovereign directly from my own forges?
Ignore me if this is already in the works and, like many features, it's just not included in the current beta - but if it's not already planned to happen at some point, it ought to be. A shop is another good feature, but not a substitute; I'd hate to be using my city tiles on mines instead of markets, researching the very best steel plate instead of tax collectors, and find that this somehow leads to my sovereign being less well equipped because you can only equip him with gold spent in shops and not with iron and forges.
Come to think of it, the kids make this even more important - sure if it's just your sovereign, you might save up a few hundred gold to equip him. But what if you have half a dozen sons that want to charge into battle but have only daggers and the clothes on their backs? It's conceivable, even likely that you'll have the iron to equip twenty new soldiers but not the gold to buy armor for six sons, and that really doesn't make any sense - if you can make the equipment, you need a way to transfer it to existing units instead of limiting it to newly created ones. It shouldn't be difficult to put this in the shop interface, you just need the option to buy items for materials/metal/gems/whatever resources they normally cost instead of gold, if you have the technology to make those items.
