Economy rework (cargo, passengers and storage)

[MagicBuzz]

Hello,

For a long time, I have some ideas/whishes about economy system.
Those ideas mostly come from two other games I plaid a long time ago: “Capitalism” and “Transport Giant”. Some others were already implemented as NewGRF, while I think it should be a global setting, not limited to GRFs that implement them.

Stations:
Currently, we can “store” any amount of cargo/passengers/etc. in any station: bus stop, docks, airports and trains stations have “unlimited” storage space.
I think it should be more challenging to limit the cargo space of stations. Let’s say, 20t (of any cargo) per square.
This would reduce the use of “mammoth trains” and make the use of “eye candy” station GRF more profitable.

Cargo:
Secondary industries should process cargo over time according they max capacity, instead of processing all the supplied cargo immediately.
Thus the cargo waiting to be processed should remain in the providing station: so heavy trains should wait to unload instead of unloading thousands of tons in a second.
Next, each industry should have “contracts” and cargo should be delivered only for those customers. May the cargo could be delivered to any other, but with a big penalty. May the contracts should change over time. May they should have quantities pre-defined. It could be some difficulty settings.

At last, passengers, mail and valuable:
There are two options. In Transport giant, each house have citizen in it, and each citizen have a predefined list of destinations (school, work, shopping). This allow to build very realistic networks, as the citizen don’t go where we send them, but they take transportation system only if it allows them to go at their destination.
While I love this way to go, I think OTTD has a too big map, and houses are built/destroyed each tick, making this kind of system very complex.
A degraded version should be, for each house, a list of let’s say 2 or 3 cities where the inhabitants want to be transported. Then the passengers should be generated from this house only if a transportation system allows the people to go at any of their destination.
A very degraded version should be the same system but at city level : each city should have a predefined list of destinations.
This algorithm should be the same for mail and valuables.

What do you think about those ideas?

[acs121]

So far for the passengers, mail etc i think it would be a good thing to implement, however that would need implementation of building classes so that passengers don't go from their residence to another residence (that would be weird).
This would mean an eventual implementation of schools, hospitals, etc built by the city as it grows.

[jfs]

There is a NewGRF mod called SPI - Stock-Piling Industries. It does almost exactly what you want for industries: They take in cargo and store it, and only processes it at a certain rate. However the economy it introduces is significantly more complex than the default, which might be off-putting.