Factorio Forums

TL;DR

When in Map view, highlight a power grid if hovered over with the mouse. Right now it can be hard to tell if 2 grids are the same or not. Same for Logistic Networks.

What ?

Highlighting power grids and logistic networks when hovered over with the mouse can help to better identify them.

Logistic Networks:

Nothing too fancy, just the way ore patches get highlighted right now is going to be fine. This could be very useful to check if the roboports are connected as desired.
The #number of the network could also be displayed, similarly to how ore content is displayed for resource patches.
Furthermore, since right click in map view doesn't do anything right now, it could be used to open the logistic overview (currently L key) for that specific network.
This could be kind of counterintuitive since most things are opened by left clicking, but the "mark location" could be moved to right click before too many players get used to it.
(sidenote: right click often is associated with "move here" or "do something here" in many RTS games. Maybe "mark location" is better at right click after all, since left click is often reserved to "select" things. According to my brain, a highlighted thing BEGS to be left clicked)

Power Grids:

Here too, highlighting can be a method to quickly check if every part of the grid is connected as desired. To further aid the player, you could even use different colours other than blue to display the grid status. Red grid? Blackout. Yellow grid? We need more power here.
Similarly to Roboports, I humbly think there should be a way to interact with the power grid from far away in order to check its status. Left or Right click is not up to me to decide.

Further discussion about this on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... different/

Why ?

1) Because sometimes it can be quite hard to check if two roboport networks are the same or not, and in the logistic overview (L key) you can't really know where the hell logistic network #35 might be in a big base.

2) Because messing up with power poles can be easy at first, it can happen that a power pole is removed somewhere and a section of the factory goes into blackout without you noticing for a wile.

For the power grid: It is currently (in my opinion) no fun to use the power switch to separate power networks. I have many ideas to solve that, but basically - before anything else - there is the need to see the different networks and if it has power or not.