It will probably take a few emails to respond to all of your suggestions, and I would like to start with the following one regarding 1) Telephone Company (or Wireline Phone Company):
The dev team has been working on the City Sim Expansion Pack which will introduce a new interface for viewing the geographic coverage of the community buildings' services.- Existing Phone Companies should have their network partially built out. Similar to real estate purchases (eg. buying squares of land), phone companies should use the same architecture as they figure out where they want to build their network. More dense locations (ie. more buildings/people) can have higher build cost, but ultimately should have higher ROI
Please take a look at this post at the City Sim Expansion Pack forum that contains a work-in-progress screenshot of the new interface: http://www.capitalismlab.com/forum/view ... =16&t=2264
Do you think it makes sense to use a similar interface for the Telephone Company's network coverage? In this case, it could be a "data transmission station" (or other names that you may suggest) which the player can strategically place throughout the city to build up the network. The green areas shown on the mini map on the screenshots will indicate the telephone network coverage.
Does this make sense to you?