I guess everyone playing this wonderful game once wondered: "What kind of goods is a Factory producing out of Livestock, Grain and Steel?"
Well, i guess we'll never know, but since the original game had it this way, we're having it the same way.
Now, we do have NewIndustries and the chance to develop our own "Industry-Network", however, as far as i know there are only two new sets out there, George's ECS-Vectors and PikkaBirds' Basic Industries. I think both have done an amazing job, however, i do not like to play with neither of them - One of the main reasons is that you can only deliver a certain amount of raw materials to the Industries, or you have to deliver as much coal as iron ore to make it work properly. Also, the disappearing of Primary Industries due to non-endless resources bothers me.
While George created an almost completely new set, PikkaBird rather changed and extended the original industries, in my opinion in a very good way. I always wondered whether we could not make some small changes to the original industries to make them a) more realistic (see factory, and i said MORE realistic, not perfectly realistic
) and b) a bit more complex. I think it would make the game even better.My hope would, of course, be that those changes would "go into trunk", however, i think that some players might protest and it would cause savegame incompability. Second, more realistic option would be to design a NewGRF to play with. I do state here already that i neither have time nor knowledge to do any of that, i'm hoping that someone might be interested in the idea - if not, bad luck for me.
My "wishlist" for the basic changes would include (quite similar to PBI, credits to PikkaBird):
-Change the Factory not to accept Grain and Livestock anymore, but only Steel and maybe other, new products.
-The Grain and Livestock should be delivered to a Food Processing Plant, which generates either Goods or Food.
-Maybe the Steelmill should accept Iron Ore AND Coal, however, i never really liked the idea that you can deliver coal to both the Steelmill and the Powerplant, as the latter would probably be almost completely unused.
Those would be the 2/3 basic changes i'd like to see, i would not add that much more to prevent the system from getting "too complex", especially for new players. However, additional ideas for changes would be adding more Secondary Industries who accept raw materials and produce goods, which may be transported to other industries, like we have with the steelmill. This could be e.g. the Refinery.
I would not add industries such as the Brewery, as you can also deliver Grain to the Food Processing Plant, with both Industries producing goods i would think that the Brewery would be rather unused, which should not happen.
What do you think of the Idea in general? I admit the ideas are not new (again, credits to PBI...), just the constellation.
So the differences to PBI would be:
-Less changes to the Original Industries
-Industries accept as many cargo as you deliver, and you do not have to deliver e.g. as many coal as iron ore (of course this is less realistic, but easier to play with)
-Primary Industries do not close because of vanishing resources (one could argue about this point - does it make the game more interesting or is it rather annoying?)
What do you think?
Comments / Critic / Suggestions / Changes / Discussion is welcomed & aprreciated.
Tim
