-power and water. a staple on many worlds for manufacturing and food chains. But, the need to manually buy and sell it isn't very realistic. In real life, you don't exactly drive down to your local powerplant and buy 200 kilowatts of power to use at your home until you run out. The power gets delivered to your house as needed. Same with water.
I wonder if this type of system could be implemented on a tu server.
Each production cycle, powerplants / water pumps would run and their output would be set as a server var. Then shortly after the production stuff for buildings would run and pull power/water from these servervars to use automatically.
Main issues though would be monitoring prices if different players sold at different rates, but this could be alleviated by only allowing 1 pump / powerplant per town. However this would result in the owner of said building being critical to the town's survival, along with letting them have control over the town via prices. Gov controlled prices would eliminate the above issues, however this would have an effect on any items that go into the production of power.
Another issue is what would happen if there wasn't enough power or water to go around. Who would get what is available? Guess it could be decided randomly.