I can see how you might think that moving all that stuff around might seem like a bore. However it emphasizes the importance of supply lines. Also there's a loophole that makes it far more interesting.
The basic loophole is: When commodities are in a city they are available immediately.
So you can load up a cart with a bunch of stuff, move to a city, use that stuff to build another cart, then use that cart to move some of the stuff to another city where you build some troops to slaughter your enemy.
This loophole makes the phrase, "Where there's a will there's a way" very relevant to the game. With this loophole and some good planning, if you need to get commodities from point A to point B this turn, you'll probably be able to do it. This is less the case on a large world.
