Poor balance of electric poles/substation costs

[sinsiliux]

Compare prices of substation vs poles:

• Small pole - covers 25 spaces, 24 effective spaces - costs 0.5 wood, 0.5 copper
• Medium pole - covers 49 spaces, 48 effective spaces (2 times more than small pole) - costs 10 iron, 2 copper (12 times more than small pole)
• Substation - covers 196 spaces, 192 effective spaces (4 times more than medium pole) - costs 110 iron, 30 copper, 5 coal, 15 petroleum (depending how you look at it around 13 times more than medium pole).

This is not even accounting that for higher tier poles you need more intermediate resources.
You could argue that medium poles don't use resources that can't be automated without mods (wood) and you would be right. There's no excuse for substations costing twice more than they should though.
Higher tier electrical poles should either:

• Have bigger coverage area
• Costs less
• Give additional bonuses (maybe instead of substation we could have underground electricity or other bonuses).
• Some combination of the above

[Nova]

It's like with the free market economy: Supply and demand. The bigger power poles (substations) are the only things which can fulfill a demand for one pole with big area. There's no other alternative, you can't exchange the substation with other power poles without restructuring your factory. Because of this, the price will rise until people accept this restructuring because they think the power poles are to costly.

It's like with the Shield MK 2 or Battery MK 2 for the power armor. They are both highly inefficient for their price, but you have to pay it, because there is no other way to get more Shields or Batteries into the limited space of the power armor. Oh, and it's the same for the better transport belts. They are much more expensive then they should be.

(That does not mean that the prices are okay so, but I wanted to explain the reason why this price was chosen.)

[sinsiliux]

I knew that Shield MK2 and Battery MK2 would come up. Difference is that you have very limited space for batteries and shields and to have more shields and batteries you're forced to upgrade to better armor or better shields/batteries. In this case it makes sense to have exponential prices.

Substation and medium poles provide no significant additional value. In fact I would argue that substations provide no value at all over medium poles (both have effective space at ~98%).

[Nova]

It's not about the effectiv space. You sometimes can't use a small electric pole because you need to electrify a 3-tiles away spot. That's not possible with small power poles. The same with the substation.

[sinsiliux]

Well use two small poles instead of one medium (you still use 5x less resources) or substation. It's extremely rare that you can power something with medium/substations but can't with small poles.

[Nova]

Yeah, but it happens, and the is it.

[Koub]

Personnaly, the only place where I use the substation is for my solar+accumulator fields, just because it's easier to get a square design with substations (that are 2x2) than with poles (of 1x1).

The only thing I don't like with substations is that you can't link substations one to another without their area of effect touching each other. Therefore, I have to add a power pole between two "blocks" of solar+accus when I want to be able to walk between two blocks. I'd rather have the electric wire reach of the substation be 1 or 2 longer.

[ghoti]

I have to agree with OP. I've altered the way I build factories in response to the cost of those power poles. Because of that, I basically never use them for anything, ever. I never put myself into a situation where I need to power something 3-tiles away. It's actually rather easy to avoid once you start trying to avoid it.

[Nova]

I always just build my factory. If I see a place where I need a bigger power pole and can't rebuild it without huge work, I just use them. Still outnumbered some kind of 1 to 10.

[ssilk]

I think the substation can be used at some time with the circuits. If that's the case, I think this extra costs are fully worth it.

[DerivePi]

The small electric pole is insanely cheap. Even so, once I get medium poles, I try to never use the small poles again (I have an urge to dispose of them). Weirdly enough, I never use substations because their cost is so much higher than medium poles and I rarely need the extended range. From looking at the comparison, perhaps I should reintroduce substations since they are, for the area, only twice as expensive as medium poles.

[OBAMA MCLAMA]

I will gladly pay 50 times more for a medium pole just so I can start burning the small poles in my steam engines.

Small poles are as temporary as your burner mining drills are. Once you have something better, you use it.

[sinsiliux]

But they really aren't better. 99% cases where I would use 2 medium poles, I could just use 3 small poles. In fact I'm planning to do my next playthrough not using medium poles at all. I wouldn't use transformators too, but I just can't figure out a nice looking layout for solar panels/accumulators without them.

[bobingabout]

most of the places I use 2 medium pole, I could just use 2 small poles. most of the time the distance between poles is more of an issue to use medium than the coverage area for me.

[ssilk]

Just want to throw in: There are worlds with very rare amounts of wood...

[Tinyboss]

Quality doesn't increase linearly with price anywhere (that I know of) in the real world, either. Does the $5,000 bicycle perform 10x as well as the $500 one? Is a $200,000 super sports car 100x as fast (or even 5x?) as your basic sedan? There are countless more examples we could name. I don't find the prices surprising. I would be surprised if they were directly proportional to area covered. Convenience is worth something, too!

[sinsiliux]

I don't think your metaphor is 100% correct. Yes price doesn't increase linearly with quality as evident by real world examples and things like batteries/shields in factorio world.
However size increase is not quality increase. It adds pretty much no convenience. The more correct metaphor I think would be this:
Would you rather buy 2 apples for 0.1$ each or 1 apple that's twice the size but for 2$ (taste and other properties are the same)? Sure maybe it's more convenient to only have to throw out 1 apple core rather than 2, but is it really worth 20x increase in price?
That's why I think one of these (or a combination of all) should be implemented:
1. Decrease price for medium poles/transformators.
2. Add new unique properties to medium pole/transformator so that they can fill in some specific niche (for examples transformators connect to other transformators no matter the distance).
3. Add limitations to small poles (eg. they may get damaged every game tick if you're using more than 10MW of power, but this doesn't seem very fun).

[The Phoenixian]

Compare prices of substation vs poles:

• Small pole - covers 25 spaces, 24 effective spaces - costs 0.5 wood, 0.5 copper
• Medium pole - covers 49 spaces, 48 effective spaces (2 times more than small pole) - costs 10 iron, 10 copper (20 times more than small pole)
• Substation - covers 196 spaces, 192 effective spaces (4 times more than medium pole) - costs 110 iron, 30 copper, 5 coal, 15 petroleum (depending how you look at it around 8 times more than medium pole).

Okay, forgive my saltiness but the Medium pole info here is flagrantly false.

It is not 10 copper per it is 2 copper per, a fourfold increase of an already fairly cheap resource for a twofold increase in coverage.
Say what you will about whether one log to 2 steel + full automation capacity is worth that price but please get your numbers right, especially if you're going to refer back to it for future arguments.

[sinsiliux]

Fair enough, I've fixed my mistake in original post. However one thing you don't account for is that you will likely have 10s of thousands of wood once you research construction robots so can easily automate small pole production too.

[LordFedora]

I don't know about you, but every map i seem to generate is either half lakes, or a giant bloody desert, that i can't seem to get out of...