sounds like you'd be interested in my warcraft3 mod project.
it has a similar name, Forge of Empires, an rts where you manage cities by distributing it's population through several fields: food production, goods production, military support, trade and research. cities grow slowly, and your main means of acquiring more population would be through conquering independent cities. each city would produce 3 kinds of units, peasant levy, professional soldiers and elite soldiers, equipped with armor and weapons defined by the player, and trained with specific improvements also chosen by the player
the main resources would be gold and food, but some randomly placed map features would give you access to secondary resources, which would give you some bonuses: iron mines would make troop production cheaper, etc.
your troops would be managed in abstracted armies, that would battle on another screen, and would have limited food supplies, that would need to be restocked in cities or through supply caravans, would have a morale stat that would be influence by secondary resources like wine, your commander's leadership stats, your nation's reputation, and terrain modifiers: nords would suffer more in hot lands, and southerners would suffer less in deserts and more in cold lands
the player would also be able to recruit military commanders, city governors, and empire advisors from noble houses associated with big cities, some cities having more than one noble house, and each house having various candidates with different skills , from tactician bonuses, reputation bonuses, leadership bonuses, reputation, etc. the thing is, some of these houses would hate each other, and recruiting commanders from one house could anger another, and you'd sometimes have to chose from recruiting and awesome commander taking the risk of angering your awesome city governor, or choosing the governor's cousin, who is a passable commander, but not nearly as awesome as the other dude.
there'd be 4 main civilizations, nord, southern, eastern and western, based on vikings and Germanic tribes, Egyptians and African tribals, Sumeria and Persia, and Greece and Rome, but the main objective of the game would be to allow you to customize your empire's civilization, both in looks as in playability