Is Upgrading Generator Range Even Worth It?

[Playerjjjj]

After completing New Home and Arks, I never really saw a point to upgrading the generator's range. Steam hubs are super effective, take up virtually no space, and are fairly cheap to operate, especially with upgrades. Presumably the range upgrades are more coal efficient if fully utilized, but. Maybe I just suck at urban planning, but inefficiency aside I didn't have too much trouble with coal consumption in either scenario. I even managed to save New Manchester without compromising myself.

This is all on normal difficulty. Is the range upgrade somehow better on higher difficulties, or with more efficient city layouts?

[General Idea]

As you said, steam hubs invariably are more efficient than the range extension on the generator. However, there is an award for finishing a scenario without building a single steam hub, Central Heating. You can gain it on any difficulty level, so obviously 'The Arks' on easy difficulty level is the most likely of scenario's to obtain it.

[Bobywan]

Not really. Steam hubs are more efficient up to the last upgrade of the gen range which covers a large area.

[khumak]

The achievement is the only reason to ever upgrade generator range. Steam hubs are better at covering more area with a heat zone at a lower coal usage. They can also be individually managed so you can turn off some of your steam hubs during the day, leave others on 24x7, set some up for extended shifts, etc. With the generator range upgrade it's all or nothing. It's either on or off.

Seems like something they should have tweaked IMO but they didn't. IMO the generator range should have been superior to steam hubs for the space surrounding the generator and the reason to build steam hubs should have been that you want to heat things that are out of range of the generator. Oh well. That's not the way it works.

By the late game it doesn't matter much anyway since you typically have way more coal production than you need, so I will sometimes research generator range anyway even though I don't need to and then tweak the position of my steam hubs to only cover what's outside of a max range generator.

[alexander.julian.erhard]

Steam Hubs are way superior to Generator Range I´m wondering how the devs didn´t realize that. They are about 2x as coal efficient than early generator range and still maybe 1,4x as efficient then going from range 3 to 4.

BUT on top of that there are researches that reduce steam hub coal consumption by 33%, the generator only gets 20%.

And yes, you need to spend some steel to build them, 20 a piece I think.
But since Steam Hubs is a T0 tech, range upgrades are T1, T3, T5, therefore more time-consuming and expensive, and the fact that you consume less coal, you are able to just produce more steel earlier.

[Playzr 🐵]

I always go with steam hubs too. There's usually a bit of overlap but they're still efficient. I mean it has to be more efficient since you're spending some steel on them. I still keep the houses clumped together instead of spreading them out. The steam hub range upgrade is before the efficiency upgrade so I have to change them back to range 1 when I do that. But after the range upgrade it becomes difficult to judge where new steam hubs should go. Steam hubs are also useful for production buildings as an alternative to heaters, or with both on at the same time if cold enough.