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My group just hit upon an idea to make choosing between these more interesting.
As far as we could tell, for every hill hex there is no reason not to build a mine with a corresponding foundry instead of a quarry. Our reasoning:
A hills hex with a farm, a mine, and foundry in a connected city reduces consumption by 2 and produces 1 Stability and 3 BP. (2 BP directly and +3 economy which is 1 BP using the UC calculation for economy)) for a total of 26 BP. (We ignore the unrest penalty because we are expanding quickly and houses reduce it in addition to allowing for other useful buildings.)
The hills hex with a farm and a quarry on the other hand reduces consumption by 2 and produces 1 BP and 1 Stability for the total cost of 10 BP. The 16 BP savings of the quarry is then negated after 8 turns because there is no building you can buy for 16 BP that will get you 2 BP income per turn. The savings on the quarry is just a trap.
But we came up with two rules (one by accident) that make for more interesting decisions:
1) Mines can only be built where an ore vein has been found already. The party can pay BP and wait one turn to see if a suitable spot is be found (the Kingmaker AP lists a few as part of hexploration, but our GM has picked other secret sites where there are veins). Each time we pay a team to search a hex for ore, the GM rolls a dice in secret to see if any is found, with a cumulative bonus for repeatedly searching the same hex.
2) Quarries on the other hand can be built on any hills hex, but any farm built on a hill with a quarry has its output reduced by 1.
The immediate result is that we are now much more interested in hexploring nearby hills first and then debating how long do we want to send teams to find ore before we give up and build a quarry.
Is there an optimal solution that we haven't found yet or do these rules create a solid mechanic for creating more investment in team decisions?