Factorio Forums

I think that one part of why flying bots are currently so OP, is that distributing power to the many roboports is too easy. Just plop a line of cheapo powerpoles and all the power for potentially 1000+ bots can be transferred from one point of your base to any other point of your base.

I think that the power system should be capacity based much like belt lines, which also only have a certain capacity. Thus, if you have a large solar array over here, you'd need some serious tech and build-up in order to get all that power over there. Much in line with that, I think that power lines should actually have directed power transfer rather than the undirected as it is now. For really large power transfers there should even be laser-based direct link directed power transfers over large distances.

Additionally, all the power transfer options should have a certain loss per distance unit, so that it would be really worthwhile to build a large expensive option to transfer large volumes of power with little loss.

Going over the capacity of a power transfer option should "burn" the power line or poles, or even explode, depending on how much more was sent through the thin line.

I think that this would massively add to the interesting challenges of building the right designs.

This was discussed many times. The electric network works the way it works because of performance reasons, no way around it.

I searched the forum for corresponding threads, but didn't find anything. Maybe it was described in different words or something. I am sorry. Performance reasons is not a good counter-argument, though, because this argument can be used on practically anything.

YourConscience wrote:I searched the forum for corresponding threads, but didn't find anything.

viewtopic.php?f=80&t=15546

You could get avoid most performance issues by not recalculating everything in every update and staggering updates

Say, every 10s a power plant checks for nearby potential power drainers. Find the nearest ones, apply a distance cost to their power drain and that becomes their new power drain for the next 5999 updates.

If you wanted to really make it UPS efficient, you can apply some logic to have multiple nearby power sources treated as a single power source. e.g. 120 steam engines in a single block could be treated as a single big steam engine located at the mid point of the engine block.

YourConscience wrote:I searched the forum for corresponding threads, but didn't find anything. Maybe it was described in different words or something. I am sorry. Performance reasons is not a good counter-argument, though, because this argument can be used on practically anything.

What does simulating actual electric networks achieve for gameplay?
Needing to troubleshoot an electricity network along with the logistic network sounds like a nightmare. Factorio is a game first and foremost, finding that one bottlenecked power pole in tens of thousands of automatically connected power poles doesn't sound like a good design.

The other fact is that the real-life capacity of high-voltage power lines is utterly ridiculous. "For example, a 100 mi (160 km) span at 765 kV carrying 1000 MW of power can have losses of 1.1% to 0.5%. A 345 kV line carrying the same load across the same distance has losses of 4.2%." Currently, single runs of high-voltage lines can exceed a couple gigawatts of rated power (and Factorio (ostensibly) takes place in the future, where room-temperature superconductors are probably viable.)

speaking of electric networks is there some way to set the time scale so it won't reset to 5 seconds when you open the screen?