I agree village management really has to be improved. It all was fine when i had only 2-3 cities... but now i hesitate to get more cities cause it's painful to manage
(i mean seriously). I dont know if it's only me, but navigating from cities to cities is long, it has to load the village each time... just too long, and i have to cicle 2-3 times on all the cities to remember what has to be done, where to send ressources, how many, etc... I think we shouldnt have to load up the village everytime we want to know what is in it and to manage it. Though, already changing from the arrows to some kind of drop down menu would be a big help already. So i think the drop down menu from which you can see all your cities is already a good idea. Maybe a drop down menu that distinguishes villages by province would be good too.
But added to that, i think most of the managing issues would be fixed with an adaptate overview menu. The idea is simple, you see the current Overview > Villages; it would just need to be able to manage units production and ressources transferts from there. When you click on the line corresponding to a certain village's units, it could simply open the barracks. The barracks with a little indicator of the present ressource in the village. You get to the next barrack by clicking on an other village's line.
And there would be a "send ressources" button next to the village name on the overview, and clicking on it would open a window or redirect you to an overview where you see all your cities, the ressources available in each cities and just slide some bars for each ressources you want to send from each village and click send all... Something that simple could make it way easier to manages our villages.
Edit: and ultimately, best would be that when you place units on the recruitement queue from this overview, the order is not made immediately.You would be able to see from the global overview what are the new units that are about to be recruited on each village (maybe a "+ number" in green next to current number in village or below), and you would have an indicator of the final outcome of ressources on each village after the order is preceeded. If things are not so good finally, you could re-click on a village's line and modify your order for recruiting in that village. And when all is ok for you, you could then press a "order all" button, or something like that, to confirm your recruiting orders in all of your cities at the same time.