Factorio Forums

If you want to remove cables from power poles, you can hold a copper cable in your cursor and shift click on a power pole to delete the connections from the power pole; however, if you want to delete a circuit network connection (red or green) from a power pole (or any other circuit network device), you have to create a connection over top of the existing connection to remove it. To me, this behaviour is very unintuitive. I think that removing circuit network connections should work the same as removing power pole connections: Hold the appropriate coloured circuit network cable in your cursor and shift click on the structure to remove the circuit network connections of that colour from that structure.

Going even further, what would benefit both power poles and circuit network structures is to allow you to shift click a specific connection (click on the cable in the air) to be able to delete that specific connection, and if you wanted to delet all connections, you shift click on the base structure.

To be fair, you can remove the copper wire connections via the same means.

The difference is that copper wires have 2 remove methods: individual and all.

Red/green wires only have the individual method.

I suspect the reason for this difference in behavior is because removing and replacing an entity will delete all red/green wires permanently, whereas doing the same with a power pole simply recreates all of the copper wire connections (to other power poles).

I just miss a bulk wire remove method.
See viewtopic.php?f=6&t=46960 Add Green and Red wire to the Deconstruction Planner

On the other side I wish a more clear, more intuitive circuit/wire construction method in general, which would make parts of this suggestion obsolete, because you don’t need to deconstruct, because you don’t make so much errors, because of this wired representation. And there is no real need to have wires on hand. The current way to built up wires and cables is just ugly gameplay.

See
viewtopic.php?f=80&t=30845 About Cables and Wires / Make Wires Free / Power Poles Contain Cables
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=41176 Improve Basic Circuit Overview

And I recommend using https://mods.factorio.com/mod/WireShortcuts
The more it is used, the better the chance it is changed.