In Oblivion, I found most buildings were really kind of useless since they had nothing good to steal (though that's another thread) and because there was only 3 services per city, and only 1 (excluding inns) in the entire collection of towns. Do you think they should add a higher proportion of services? And make there more purpose in choosing one service over another, like I should go to this weapon shop instead of that one because this one specialises in axes, so they are higher quality, which is what I need. That sort of thing.

Nothing wrong with the daggerfall system, shiny posh shops and run down ratholes who sell cheap rubbish, and they kind of had a go in OB with the discount spell shop. really, if you want a wide range of goods,the cities should be the only port of call, with maybe one cheap/general store and perhaps one store with a very limited quality trade in a smaller town.
Of course,changing inventories will tell us if this dynamic economy is up to anything of worth.

I thought OB pulled the shop diversity and amount fairly well. :dance:

Oblivion had a greater amount of shops in the Imperial City, just in terms of merchants who sold weapons and armor, there were four shops, if I remember correctly, two smiths, one focusing on blunt weapons and one offering a selection of other weapons, and two armorers, one specializing in shields and one having two merchants, one who sold light armor and one who sold heavy armor, but mostly, this was limited to the Imperial City, for other cities, there was typically only one shop of each type, but I'd say this is likely a concequence of the scaled down nature of the gameworld. realistically speaking, one city might have quite a few merchants who sell the same sort of items, but in a scaled down city, Bethesda also has to scale back the number of shops.or we'd end up having too many shops to be believable in relation to the amount of houses in the city. It doesn't necessarily always have to be limited to one shop of each type per city, I would say that it really depends on the size of the city, but a minimum of one shop of each type is enough to provide for the player's basic needs.

They didn't always have one of each main type. Just 3 stores of random types. Leyawiin had a general store,a smith and a book shop. Bruma had a smith, a clothing store and a general store etc.

The Archer's Paradox was always my fave! Bravil, if I remember correctly

More varitety, less shops (the imperial city)

I think they should add some more shops, or at least add a market district like in the Imperial City. But, all the shops should specialize in different stuff, like Dragonbone said.

I'm personally not a fan of how they had the market district in the Imperial City, mainly because shops were the main thing you came to cities for besides quest goals, and it meant that you almost never needed to go to another district. They were all clumped together in one place.

Not so sure about it.
It all depends how large cities are actually.
Also, I don't want Skyrim to turn into capitalistic province where stores will try to eat each other up.
Only towns that are equivalent of Imperial City/Vivec should have multiple stores of same type.