Perhaps renaming the resources but maintaining the mechanics are not the way to go about this. I think developers need to expand on other avenues for resource economy in strategy games. This is the million dollar question for RTS's really. How do you innovate the resource economy aspect of your game while maintaining the fun, depth, and presentation of it all?

I have a million and 1 ideas like everyone else, but I don't have the energy right now to type it all out lol.

Many would like to see deeper crafting and harvesting in mmo's.  In my experiance Vanugard is the only one, very deep !.....Yet the game is on it's last leg, with going F2P.

Future ?....Well, will have to see.  With the crap developers are puting out, I'm not expecting much more than shallow mmo's much less a good crafting and harvesting sub game.....Blizzard and SOE are about our best bet to put out anything you would be looking for.

Blizzard = more fun type ( if you would call it that )

SOE = Deep ( I would count on them more )

What about Populous?  It had a fairly different style of play that was focused more on teraforming the land rather than harvesting resources.

( I don't know much about the modern RTS games out there ... although I love watching simulations unfold, I find I just don't have the efficiency of clicking to play those sorts of games at anything beyond laid-back beginner levels )

Originally posted by Quirhid
Settlers

Was about to say the same thing, to be honost don't know many rts games that are based on grain, wood, stone and iron only.

In most RTS games I know these are just your base resource and from there on you refine it into other resources or items.

I love the visual presentation of The Settlers 7 Paths to a Kingdom, I liked Settlers Heritage of Kings more gameplay wise due to more freedom S7 felt rather linear compared to S6.

Originally posted by Loktofeit
Kyleran has a point. While devs could give other names to things, it doesn't do much other than make it less intuitive. The new player knows the value and order of copper, iron, and steel; by changing that to Gormium, Detium and Romulandium the 'creativity' is offset by the obfuscation and extended learning curve.

Why should there be a canonical value and order of the metals?  Why not just have different materials used for different things.  Even today, copper has plenty of uses where iron and steel would be wildly inappropriate.

Oh wait, we're talking about an RTS, where the "real-time" component overwhelms the "strategy" component, leaving the game mostly about how well you can keep track of what is going on and click really fast without much in the way of strategy?  That explains it.