Well after reading the design document, I must say I don't really like the keystone concept as it is planned at the moment. Having a city's industries being bound solely to the keystones that are present in the city on a given time feels too artificial.
I'll use as example some small cities I've visited. They often have dozens of local industries which range from construction, metallurgic, textile and food industry for instance, all based in local resources which are hardly produced in a centralized massive building. Metallurgic and construction industries often import their raw materials from a quarry or steel mill which can be sited several hundred kilometers away. Food and textile industries often are based on the local production of fibre and foodstuff, which in turn comes from farms which can all be local family farms and not massive factory farming complexes. Same goes for lumber industries, often the lumber comes from small and local operations which in turn go to equally small factories which make all sorts of goods from them.
On the other hand, in larger and more developed cities we can really see the mechanics you propose for keystone lots creating a whole host of demand orbiting around central industries such as a large car factory, a large refinery or such. Yet there's a significant portion of industries on a city which don't rely so directly on the keystones and would be affected less if such keystone went out of business (namely they'd take a hit due to the weakened consumer market from the jobs the keystone doesn't generate anymore).
I think a best of two worlds model where keystones would provide a boost to specific industries and industry chains, but with a given "background" spontaneous medium-to-small industry level which interacts with the world beyond the region and with keystones in other cities would be more interesting.
If we wanted to go on a more sophisticated route, a system where we could add as many "resource" tags as we wanted and programmed factories to uptake a certain ammount of resources X, Y and Z and produce another X ammount of resources A and B, for instnace, could potentially provide a more detailed simulation. I had thought out such a system for the aborted simcity project I tried to lead some time ago, but I could write it out again if you guys are interested.
Edited by Djohaal, 15 March 2012 - 09:08 PM.
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OcramSeattle, on 10 March 2012 - 01:53 PM, said:
