Is it possible to produce more resources like steal and aluminium from the same place by assigning more civil factories to the areas or maybe assigning more manpower ? Since there in reality are plenty of resources in the ground its just a matter of digging them up and processing them.
civilian factories are only used to build up your nation (factories, defenses, radar, rocket sites, infrastructure etc) and for trade. You basicly trade away civilian factories for strategic resources on the global market from other nations, which in return then can use those civilian factories to build up their nation. That is a great mechanic to help smaller or less developed nations to build up their nation.
As for resource production, there are "excavation" techs, which increase the output of strategic resources. Other than that you cant influence the resource production, but occupied territory gives you less of the total depending on your occupation policies of course.
An set percentage of your resources is always reserved for the global market and cant be used elsewhere. That percentage depends on your trade laws, which give you nice bonuses to production speed and even research speed (both up to 15% if nothing has changed yet), but also can take away up to 80% of your resources.
Only fascist and communist nations can enact the "closed economy" policy, which gives you controll over 100% of your resources, but prevents you from importing resources aswell. You wont get any factory output or research speed bonuses from that of course and it should only really be seen as an desperate attempt to prevent loosing the war, just as the "scraping the barrel" conscription law.
