Imbalance between Corrugated Steel and Reinforced Concrete

[nmdanny]

While I was looking into a T3 material to build a factory, I noticed that when using maxed skills, there's absolutely no (gameplay) reason to pick Reinforced Concrete.

Comparison

• Corrugated Steel Requires 0.4 Steel to make at Steelworking Efficiency 5 in 24 seconds with Steelworking Speed 5

• Reinforced Concrete Requires 0.4 Rebar and 0.2 Concrete to make at Cement Production Efficiency 5 in 24 seconds with Cement Production Speed 5

  • 1 Concrete requires 8 Stone to make via the given maxed skills in 24 seconds.
  • 1 Rebar requires 1 Steel to make at Casting Efficiency 5 in 6 seconds with Casting Speed 5

Conclusion If producing via the most efficient and fastest skills,

• Corrugated steel only requires maxing 2 skills from 1 specialty and 0.4 Steel to make at the fastest and most efficient way
• Reinforced Concrete you'd need to max 4 skills from 2 specialty as well as needing more materials - 0.4 Steel AND 1.6 Stone

Corrugated steel is both cheaper in terms of materials and especially in terms of SP/Skills, making it superior to Reinforced Concrete in evvery way.

• Reinforced concrete has a one time use for making an Oil Drilling Skill Book - but most people won't pick cement efficiency/speed skills for that.
  
• All involved skills (steelworking, casting, cement) seem to follow the same SP rise
  
• I did not consider the costs of making the steel itself(refining iron ore into iron ingots into steel) because it doesn't affect the calculations.
  

Suggestions

• Make Rebar use even less steel: perhaps halve its base steel cost to 2.5 Steel per Rebar, culminating at 0.5 Steel per Rebar at maximum cement efficiency. This will make Reinforced Concrete viable for when Iron/Steel becomes scarcer and more expensive, at the cost of a higher SP investment.
• Make Reinforced Concrete a T4 material

[elfl0rd]

https://github.com/StrangeLoopGames/EcoIssues/issues/9761