Factorio Forums

Power poles have enjoyed a huge buff with quality, especially medium power poles which go from 7x7 to 17x17, a whopping 5.9x buff, rivaling a base quality substation while having a 1x1 footprint. big poles however, have not been buffed like this.

Every power pole scales the same way regardless of it's base stats, which is +2 wire reach and +2x2 area. this isn't good for big poles, which go from 32 wire reach to 42 which is a buff of 1.31, not much like the 2.5x buff that legendary is expected to give. 4 legendary poles cover the same distance as 5 common poles (exact distance covered is 128:130). the 14x14 radius on these big poles is not as good as it sounds because realistically, you're using big poles to cover distance and not to power stuff. even if you need that extra radius, placing a regular substation would still be better than a legendary big pole.

This is why I suggest that the wire reach of big poles should scale better, going up to 80 for the 2.5x buff or at least 64. I know people like the 32 reach poles because even pole covers 1 chunk this way and they have their rail blueprints designed around it, more reach will still be good for those long distance rails that don't have intersections, where you don't necessarily need a pole every chunk.

This also goes to substations, which I feel don't scale as good as they should. despite having their large base area, quality increases it by 2x2 which is the same as medium poles. in terms of length of a side, medium poles scale from 7 to 17, which is a 2.4x buff, which is close to the 2.5 expected from legendary. so if substations are scaling the same way, they should scale up to 45x45. odd numbers on power poles are silly so lets keep it at a simple +4 per quality and +8 on legendary which would make them go up to 38x38. this is a length buff of 2.1 and an area buff of 4.4. not even as much as medium poles so it's not even as op as it sounds.

can't agree more, medium electric pole get crazy buff feels way too much overpower buff, substation look ok and big power pole buff are pathetic.

+1 for this suggestion.
Big Power Poles by far have the weakest scaling of all the poles in regards to quality.
To be honest, it's kind of ridiculous that they only receive a +2 wire reach on every level, especially when considering they already have a wire reach of 32, which was also already increased from 30 in SA.

there are quite a couple of items that do not follow the "Quality Level" progression of +30% / +60% etc... for instance accumulators are probably the biggest culprit, increasing their power output and input by 30% but increasing their storage by 100% at the same time per level.
So Big Poles should be revised in this case, especially since Wire Reach (Length) is usually the first and only reason you're even building them in the first place.
As already described due to the flat scaling smaller power poles (small, medium) are getting MUCH more quality bonus than larger ones (big, substations)

On Fulgora, where you usually start to play around with higher quality due to Q3 modules, even legendary ones are pretty useless, since for most of the islands even legendary power poles cannot cover most of the distances between them.

I'm going to bump this, but I actually noticed something different.

The uncommon power medium power poles get a 9x9 area, which is *just barely* enought to connect 16 solar cells, which is a great upgrade (maybe disproportionally good) from the regular mediums which only connect 6.

Which mean you "can" arrange them like this, except you can't, because the wire reach isn't long enough.



Looking at the patterns, it looks like quality just slaps +2 per level on each area and wire reach on all electric poles. The original design for the reaches and areas is quite good, I would love to see similar detail for the scaling to make them work for higher quality.

Especially uncommon material is actually common enough to be used for a mass upgrade, so this would be a small change but a very big impact for how we can play with quality.

Theragus wrote: ↑Sun Dec 01, 2024 7:17 pmOn Fulgora, where you usually start to play around with higher quality due to Q3 modules, even legendary ones are pretty useless, since for most of the islands even legendary power poles cannot cover most of the distances between them.

That might actually be an argument against the buff. Not a very good one though, IMO. I couldn't agree more that large electric poles specifically should have a bigger wire reach improvement, at the cost of supply area. As someone else pointed out, you're not building the large poles to power things. (Except that sometimes I like to have one large pole per big drill because it looks sick.)

+1, this had occurred to me before as well. Reaching for long distances is what big power poles are 'supposed to do', and hardly getting a buff to their primary purpose is underwhelming.

By the time you get legendary power poles you can make foundation, so I'm not concerned about what legendary poles do to Fulgora balance.