Finding a way to make the construction industry private is an aspiration we have, actually! Like many of you have pointed out, it does sound really cool and more realistic.
As it turns out though, after quite a bit of experimentation, this is harder than you might expect at first blush. For example, would you really want a gameplay dynamic where the fewer buildings you construct at once, the cheaper it is to construct those buildings, making it optimal (but very inconvenient) to only construct one thing at a time? What about if you do build a large number of buildings at once, creating a need for a large number of construction workers, who then get fired as soon as the construction completes because there's no projects left to work on? If construction industry is all very local in nature, how do you build ports to connect your overseas markets when local access to construction materials is non-existent? Do you have to set (and potentially constantly adjust) a construction budget that determines how much resources the construction industry has to operate with?
All these quite tricky questions, each of which add a number of gameplay concerns that need solutions, fade away when you treat Construction not as a variable-cost good bought and sold on the open market but as a capacity, with the player's job being to appropriately size that capacity while minimizing its cost. While I'd love to continue experimenting with Construction Sectors in the future to see if we can find a model where they can operate privately without damaging gameplay, I find it provides just the right level of player decision-making at the moment, while still being quite a bit more involved and interconnected with our socioeconomic simulation than construction usually is in strategy games.
As it turns out though, after quite a bit of experimentation, this is harder than you might expect at first blush. For example, would you really want a gameplay dynamic where the fewer buildings you construct at once, the cheaper it is to construct those buildings, making it optimal (but very inconvenient) to only construct one thing at a time? What about if you do build a large number of buildings at once, creating a need for a large number of construction workers, who then get fired as soon as the construction completes because there's no projects left to work on? If construction industry is all very local in nature, how do you build ports to connect your overseas markets when local access to construction materials is non-existent? Do you have to set (and potentially constantly adjust) a construction budget that determines how much resources the construction industry has to operate with?
All these quite tricky questions, each of which add a number of gameplay concerns that need solutions, fade away when you treat Construction not as a variable-cost good bought and sold on the open market but as a capacity, with the player's job being to appropriately size that capacity while minimizing its cost. While I'd love to continue experimenting with Construction Sectors in the future to see if we can find a model where they can operate privately without damaging gameplay, I find it provides just the right level of player decision-making at the moment, while still being quite a bit more involved and interconnected with our socioeconomic simulation than construction usually is in strategy games.
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