Balancing of [Alternate] Caterium Wire

Question

Hi there.
IMHO the alternate recipe "Caterium Wire" should have a rebalance. Caterium Tech is way later than the Iron Wire (Alternate) and while the math is 2 iron ore ->2 Iron Ingot->9 wire you need 4 caterium ore->1 Caterium Ingot -> 9 wire. Which means, that it actually not clever to use Caterium Wire as alternative to Iron Wire (especially since Caterium is way more rare than Iron). Yet until Caterium is very High-Tech I would recommend to increase the amount of Wire you get for 1 Ingot to actually make a potential use of this alternate.
Best regards and keep up the great work,

Mordaen

Comments

There is also a caterium + copper recipe that doesn't work well if you do the math

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I'm not sure about a rebalance so much as a complete reassessment. I've seen three alternate wire recipes, not including basic quickwire, and at least two of them are useless to me.

I've been running a MK1 miner on a normal copper node for an entire game. It feeds everything that needs plain wire and everything that needs cable and I have lots of both stored. I use very little copper compared to iron while caterium is too late game to use as a substitute for copper.

In other words, my demand isn't nearly high enough for the iron wire or the caterium standard wire recipes to be useful to me. If I was going for speed, I'd just get another copper node or two (the grasslands has several nodes), maybe upgrade the original mine to a Mk2, if I'm that far along.

The alternate quickwire recipe is huge IF you use quickwire in large quantities. So far, I haven't bothered with the Mk2 power poles and I'm just about to build the supercomputers for the MAM project. Chances are my caterium mine has already made enough quickwire for them so I just gotta start dumping parts into my separate assembly system.

Side note: I think the alternate quickwire recipe and the alternate standard wire recipe that uses caterium ingots are both called "caterium wire, alternate." I'll double check that when I play the next map and post a separate bug post for it if there isn't one.