A factory sim but with a world market to trade resources with other players. The market would not have any sort of standard currency, but instead every potential item or resource you can mine/manufacture is directly traded for other items/resources. This would create potential for arbitrage by savvy players.
The problem is, once you've created that kind of market, everything needs to be handled server-side to prevent clients from cheating and using hacked save files to give themselves tons of resources and making the market worthless.
The cloud compute costs for running thousands of factories could get expensive. I suppose factories of offline players could be abstracted away. ie, "You produced X widgets in ten minutes, then went offline for an hour, so when you come back, you will have 6*X widgets".
It's a non-combat RTS more than a factory game, but your description sounds a lot like 'Offworld Trading Company'
There are also a lot of factory games in Roblox, and an interesting detail is that they are generally multiplayer and you are indeed interacting and competing with the other factories much like you describe. Hard to find the good ones in the sea of games though.
I have OTC, and it's not quite what I'm looking for. OTC is all about market manipulation and being extremely strategic on which plots you buy. And a single round is short, I'm looking for something you'd play for hours, and the market would look like a crypto exchange, but instead of coin pairs, it's item/resource pairs.
Blockchains for distributed ledgers to manage cheating. Resource specific ledgers would balance against exchange ledgers. You would have a ledger for each possible trade. Basically you'd have a standard crypto exchange.
You might be interested in O-Game, which was kind of like what you're describing on the factory front, but doesn't have any economy that I recall.
I think you misunderstand where the cheating happens.
It's not about cheating the trades or the market, it's about a client saying "btw I have a massive factory that's producing 10 million widgets per hour" on release day.
Factory simulation needs to happen server-side. You can't trust the client to have followed the rules on resource mining and factory building.
The problem is, once you've created that kind of market, everything needs to be handled server-side to prevent clients from cheating and using hacked save files to give themselves tons of resources and making the market worthless.
The cloud compute costs for running thousands of factories could get expensive. I suppose factories of offline players could be abstracted away. ie, "You produced X widgets in ten minutes, then went offline for an hour, so when you come back, you will have 6*X widgets".