Hi everyone!
For a while now, I've been working on this economy sim heavily inspired by games like The Settlers 3/4 and the Anno series. The core gameplay is that you create buildings which either "create" some form of goods, or convert one or two goods into something different.
For example, in those games, you might have an iron mine and a coal mine, producing raw iron/coal from some map deposits, then you might have some iron smelting plant which produces some form of refined iron and/or iron ingots from those raw goods. So basically, there's a single building for each conversion, and each building will typically only support one conversion.
Then I played some modded Minecraft (Beyond Reality pack, based on GregTech) which also have resources and production chains, even if it's in a very different way. In that case, you have a small set of machines that are capable of different conversions depending on input. For example, there's the Furnace which takes some form of ore, and some form of fuel, and creates an ingot of that ore type. IIRC, the game Factorio works a bit like this as well.
To compare the styles, in Settlers or Anno, we'd have something like
Iron mine (iron ore) -> Iron smelter (iron ingot) -> Smith (tool)
Gold mine (gold ore) -> Gold smelter (gold ingot) -> Jeweler (jewelry)
Copper mine (copper ore) -> Copper smelter (copper ingot) -> Whatever
With a Minecraft / Factorio inspired style, we'd rather have
Mine (iron ore, gold ore, copper ore) -> Smelter (ingot dep. on input) -> Smith/Jeweler/Whatever
With the Minecraft / Factorio approach, one might instead have different tiers of each building, with different efficiency or similar, and a certain conversion process might require at least tier N of that building.
Which style do you prefer?