There are several occasions where making a component requires 2 raw resources.
- Make Wheels requires 2 Steel per Wheel.
- Make Tires requires 2 Rubber per Tire.
- Make Doors requires 2 Steel Sheets per Door.
- Make Lights requires 1 Steel and 1 Glass per Light.
That is a problem even with large maps with a lot of resource importers because each car needs 4 Tires, and 4 Wheels (5 with Spare Wheels), 4 doors etc…
Since they need 2 resources per component it effectively increases the required throughput by a factor of 2. So you need 8 Steel and up to 10 Rubber and so on to keep up with the demand/
Even with maxed out Importer/Conveyor upgrades it eventually starts to bottleneck the Resource Importers much like the valves used to… so your are better off at least partially importing the Wheels and Tires, Doors, etc because it would hurt the throughput drastically if you start producing them all by yourself.
The problem becomes the most noticable with Wheels and Tires and also Brakes, because they are next to each other in the assembly stage so they are likely to clog the same few resource Importers with their high resource demand.
My opinion on the matter is that Components that are required in large quantities >=4 (like Wheels, Tires, Brakes, Lights, Windows, Door Panels, Valves) should all require only 1 Resource to Make them… otherwise they start to hurt the throughput once you start making them yourself, eventually defeating the purpose of making them on site.
Components that are only required in 1-2 quantities per car can require 2 raw resources without problem though.
At least that is my impression from my hardcore playthroughs on my custom map that has a lot more Resource Importers than the standard maps. So in standard maps the throughput bottleneck is only worse.
I’d like to know what others think… if they also think that is a problem or if they think that it is actually well balanced.