Copper wire almost invisible to aging gamers

[Mauslag PIngman]

The copper wire that is strung between poles is almost invisible to someone like myself who does not have the sharpest eyesight anymore, especially with some of the backgrounds. This is also true of the edges of the electric mining drills. Of course you have to put poles up between the mining drills but when the edges of the mining drills are nearly invisible it is a little bit of a pain to plop down the pole. maybe the entire mining drill could have a mesh over it or something to make it a little more defined. The pathways between drills would then be a little more apparent.

What's that you say? Aging gamers are not a big part of your marketing target? This would also affect anyone who has less than perfect eyesight but in any case why would you want to turn anyone with twenty bucks away? Twenty bucks here and twenty bucks there. You can buy a lot of Kapusta with a hundred dollars. You probably can get a guy with an accordion too and then you can have a big Kapusta blowout party with girls, kraut and keilbasa and everything!

Edit: It has come to my attention that making things more visible might also make them uglier. This is to be avoided at all costs. Nobody likes an ugly game. Perhaps thick, highly visible wires could be an option that could be turned off in graphic optins or chosen by holding down a key at any time such as when you're looking for that next big powerline.

[zytukin]

A simple thing in the options that lets players define the colors of the wires would be great in my opinion.
My eyesight is horrible as well so sometimes have trouble seeing the wires, especially in the desert areas.
Normally I just use medium poles so place by looking at the distance between their coverage.

BTW, don't need poles between the mines if you use Transformers.
They have a 14x14 coverage, so can supply power up to 3 mines away (depending on layout).

[Mauslag PIngman]

Transformers? Do you mean substations? So far I used a substation once. I put it out in the middle of nowhere. I put down a line of poles after it and a line of laser turrets in their power area and they didn't fire as vigorously as when I had no substation so I took it down. Not sure if things have improved. Is there power loss over distance? I suppose I should be asking in gameplay.

[zytukin]

Yea, sorry, substations.
Can't say I've ever heard of power loss over distance.

It is an interesting concept though.
I hope there isn't any, I use them all over the place.

[Mauslag PIngman]

Yea. In real life there is power loss over distance. Friction. The wires in your house get warm when electricity is used. That's because copper does offer a little resistance to the electrons and the resulting friction creates heat. Its part of the reason why humongous solar farms in death valley wouldn't do anybody much good because there'd be so much loss to resistance bringing the electricity to a city. Either that or its something else. I'm sure its something. Pretty sure. Oh well, who wants to live forever? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Jtpf8N5IDE

[Koub]

Energy loss on power wires has already been suggested, and the devs stated there were no plans on adding this to the core game at that moment.

[zytukin]

Yea. In real life there is power loss over distance. Friction. The wires in your house get warm when electricity is used. That's because copper does offer a little resistance to the electrons and the resulting friction creates heat. Its part of the reason why humongous solar farms in death valley wouldn't do anybody much good because there'd be so much loss to resistance bringing the electricity to a city. Either that or its something else. I'm sure its something. Pretty sure. Oh well, who wants to live forever? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Jtpf8N5IDE

Power loss over distance is often countered in real life via transformers boosting the power before transmission, hence the high voltage lines, then step-down transformers (substations) reduce the power for household/business/etc use. Not to mention that real life distances for power decline are measured in dozens of miles, which would be tens of thousands of tiles in-game.

But, I thought you were talking about in-game substations providing less power to turrets then wires due to distance from the substation hence why you didn't want to use them for electric mines? From what I have seen and heard, the in-game substations don't limit power at all nor do they suffer any power decline that somehow doesn't apply to wires. If your laser turrets were firing slower, is it possible that they were just exceeding your power production? Each one uses 2.4MW while firing, if you had 20 trying to fire, that would be 48MW of power being consumed. If your power plant can only produce 40MW, they would fire slower.

[zytukin]

On a side note, and to get back on the topic of the hard to see wires.
Found this post in High Contrast Mode about replacing the wire graphics to make them easier to see.

I made my wires red so they stood out good (I don't use the specialized wires at all anyway)

redpower.jpg (163.65 KiB) Viewed 3640 times