wallyweb wrote:
Electricity should be like any other cargo in the game.(...)
Ideally power transmission lines should be an added form of transportation. (This should apply to pipelines too.)
planetmaker wrote:Doesn't quite add up, does it?
I'm not sure what you mean.
Frankly, to me the summary of this quoted statement of yours can be re-written as "electricity should be like any other cargo except that it should be treated special in basically every aspect".
If you disagree, "same as other cargos" also means:
a) All cargos can be boxed or bottled or packaged in one way or another, including livestock and passengers where the "box" is the vehicle itself.
b) All cargos only affect directly the "industry" (=industries, houses) which they are delivered to. This is a core concept.
c) The parent object to "industries" are towns and only that can be affected by cargos which set the town effect property.
d) All transport modes are cargo-agnostic. Each cargo can sensibly transported by each transport mode. This is also a core concept, slightly and inconsistently broken by separating truck and bus stations for road vehicles.
e) All transport modes require vehicles which which need buying, tending to and maintaining additionally to the infrastructure
Neither would need changing, if "like any other cargo" holds true.
Also: the available path to implement an effect like electricity is anything but hackish. It's one of the things GS are designed to allow (with respect to influencing towns, thus objects' parents, not other industries).
One can imagine a kind of generalized fields (like the farm fields), attached to power plant industries. That would allow electricity lines a visual appearence, but disallow them any game play effect. Combined with a GS as outlined above you'd have basically all which is being argued for.