Balancing: Boilers

The amount of machines that use steam as fuel in this game is impressive. That said, boilers scale as follows, boiler(coal) 48 steam/60, boiler(gas) 48/60, boiler(electric) 24/60. You are simply punished for using machines that are supposed to be more efficient than the previous ones, that is, there is no sense of progress. I suggest 72 steam/60 for boiler(gas) and 96/60 for boiler(electric) as this already generates a lot of punishment for using Maintenance II which is much more expensive than Maintenance I.

The reason the amount of steam for each is set to what it is is to balance steam energy production. The electric boiler currently produces 24 steam for 1.3Mw, 24 steam using T2 turbines and generators produces 1.25Mw power, if they increased it then you could produce more energy then required to power the boiler, which is thermodynamically impossible. You could notional increase the amount of steam generated, but then everything power related would have to be rebalanced.

Id simply be happy with an electric boiler that also produces 48 steam. Or better yet, make that a tier 2 upgrade for it. The only issue I really have with boilers are using them at scale. 12MW power generator requires 4 boilers or you need 1 boiler for every 4 desalinators which only nets 3 desalinators worth of water. So if you really want to take this one step farther, add an additional tier to boilers producing 96 steam each with a tier 3 electric boiler also producing 96 steam.