personally even without the great mill materials are almost never a limiting factor on building anything beyond the early game. gold is almost always more significant. only a fraction of my citizens go on workshops. i think the costs (esp for units) need to be raised across the board. if the gold costs for recruited monsters were lowered too, than the latter might then become a viable option.

Actually yes I agree.  Reduce the production to 3-6 and keep the bonus.  From what I can see from just a few games the material costs of buildings and units do need to be slightly increased.

I completely disagree. Materials are not a limiting factor because the only thing you need materials for are building troops and buildings. One could completely take out the great mill and would still have no problems getting materials. This is actually a problem with all resources in general, with two very key exceptions. Metal is a fairly large limiting factor simply because one has to actually obtain an external resource to even get metal, and Food for the exact same reason. In the current version, gildar has become more scares since it is required to recruit npcs, create units, buy items, and pay for various upkeeps. If one really wishes to make materials a bigger limiting factor than it would be more meaningful to add materials to the maintenance cost of buildings and units.

I think that is a very complex way of solving it. In one of the post 1.0 builds the equipment packs like medical and scout costed alot of material and made it a valuable resource in the mid to late game, much closer to metal than it is now. I would not be opposed to an alchemy spell or building that also does what you suggest, but lets not forget a really good use of material from the older versions.

Also, the new training regualr units with special upgrades, an idea likely to make it in, would be another very good candidate for material use. I could think of a few other ways to keep it from being a meaningless number I trade to enemies for horses, but I'd hate to get tedious.

I've been held up by Material a LOT in my early games under 1.09p.  If you are lucky enough to have a materials resource nearby, things are usually fine, otherwise even building several workshops in each city often isn't enough.  I'd like to see a more consistent distribution of materials across the map.

As for mid/late game 'hordes' of materials, that's something that can be tweaked.  If the 'bonus percentages' are making them too plentiful, reduce them.  And 24 for the great mill probably should be dropped a bit...

Materials can make or break your game.  If you have them, you can build stuff.  If you have a shortage, you can't build the armies you'll need in the first place to take them from your neighbors, let alone build up your cities at anything more than a snail's pace.

Goody huts shouldn't be the godsends, material wise, that they are now.  A better 'general availability', combined with a corresponding reduction in goody hut materials rewards, would make for a more balanced game.

And, I've found a lot more metal in goody huts than materials, so in the early game I've always ended up with a decent surplus.  I'd agree, though, that after the 'hidden resources' come into play, that Metal resources need to be pretty evenly distributed across the map. 

Also, if a neighbor ends up with a buttload of metal mines, but you don't have any, you know that there is this thing called trading, right?  I've traded with the neighbors on a few occasions to stock up.  Crystals are a nice commodity to trade for metal!  Materials are generally less plentiful these days (they get used about immediately), so neighbors generally don't have much by the way of materials to trade in the first place.  I've seen exceptions, though...

Computers don't usually want to trade for materials and If they do its always at par. Id prefer a black market like in SOASE.