The Steel Mill is a type of iron building in Fall of the Samurai.
Description[]
The earth gives power in unexpected ways.
This province will produce very good quality iron, a vital resource for weapons. As the mine and its industries are developed and expanded, the ability to train modern units improves, and the cost of locally-recruited artillery units is reduced.
Iron is, perhaps, the most important war-making commodity needed by any modern state. Without iron, there are no machines, and no modern weaponry made by those machines. Gold is very useful, but it flows to foreign hands when good iron is not available.
General Information[]
Requires 9,000 koku, 8 turns, Deep-seam Iron Mine.
- +30 tonnes of high quality iron
- +5 per turn to town growth from trade within this province
- -15% to the costs of recruiting artillery in this province
- +360 to wealth generated by mines in this province
- -2 to happiness from modernisation
Clan-wide effects:
- -5% to the costs of recruiting artillery across all provinces
Iron buildings generate iron, a profitable resource. Artillery units (all units enabled by the artillery building chain) trained in provinces with an iron specialty have discounted training costs. This makes iron specialty regions good regions to train artillery from, particularly for poor factions. Wealthy factions, however, may find buildings with a smithing specialty more useful, instead. The final tier of iron buildings reduces artillery unit costs for all provinces, however, so capturing as many iron specialty provinces as possible can save a good deal of money. Possessing iron, or trading with a faction that exports iron, is required for building arsenals (the final tier of the artillery building chain), as well as upgrading blacksmihs to iron works.
Steel mills compete with Iron Smelting Plants for being the final tier of iron buildings. While both produce just as much iron to trade and just as much cost reduction to artillery, they produce different amounts of region wealth and wealth growth, and steel mills increase modernisation while decreasing happiness.
| Iron Smelting Plant | Steel Mill | |
|---|---|---|
| Wealth | +540 | +360 |
| Growth | +3 | +5 |
| Modernisation | 0 | +3 |
| Happiness | 0 | -2 |
Compared to steel mills, iron smelting plants produce more initial wealth but have slower town wealth growth. In practical terms, this means that steel mills produce less wealth per turn than iron smelting plants until over 90 turns after they're built--and this is not including the higher cost, longer time to build, and decrease in happiness that steel mills are saddled with. In practice, iron smelting plants are almost always the superior option to build.
Iron provides no discounts for infantry or cavalry; instead, provinces with copper reduce costs of modern units. Traditional units receive discounts from the holy site buildings instead.