pleah

Some of this may have already been covered. There's a lot of good ideas above. The one thing I would like to see is a functional regional power grid. Cities would have the option of buying or selling power to/from the grid. Pricing per megawatt would be dynamic and reflect supply and demand in the region. This way if a region was generally short on power (high demand), a city could raise funds by generating power for the grid. Alternately if a region was energy rich, a small city could save money by buying power from the grid rather than generating it within its boundaries. Cost of construction and maintenance of the main transmission system (which would need to be added) would be factored into the cost of power. In this way, creating a lot of transmission capacity would drive the cost of power up, while effectively planning the grid would keep costs low. Cities would connect through a sub-station lot, which would have a limited capacity and be paid for by the city. This elimantes the SC4 system of directly buying from your neighbor. I've found that in some cases the game won't allow power to be available across one or more cities regardless of supply and demand (at best its buggy). Another thing I would like to see is consumption of goods. In SC4 industry creates goods that then vanish off the edge of the map regardless of what's next door. Supply and demand would rule the viability of industry with goods distributed to commercial zones, distributed through regional connections to commercial zones in other cities in the region, and finally as a last resort, shipped off the map through highway, rail, and seaport connections. Likewise goods would be imported to meet demand locally.