Difference between revisions of "Electrification"

Revision as of 05:46, 11 March 2020

The new power plants in 5th era have two functions. They create Electrical Tokens , used as fuel for electrical vehicles and for buying different industrial upgrades, and they create an Energy , used to power the industry giving extra production bonuses. To be able to power the industry, the player has to build electrical lines from power plant towards the industry.

Building electrical network

Firstly, open the electrification building menu by clicking on

Please note the icon in right upper corner (red arrow) - that is overlay toggle button. You can turn the color overlay on/off. That button works separately for each building menu. It is strongly advised to have it on for building electrical network, it will help to avoid disconnected wires. You can use 2 different electrical poles over the land, underwater cable to cross water areas (electrical poles are not possible to place on the bridges) and transformer station (it contains large electrical pole). There are two ways of building the lines.

1) You can click and place each pole separately - that gives you the freedom of winding lines around difficult terrain, but could be time consuming and you have to be careful to place next pole within the reach area of the previous pole.
When placing next pole in correct position, the previous pole is bright white color
But if you try to place the next pole too far, the previous one is dark grey

2) Or you can use drag and drop method - place the first pole, hold the left mouse button and drag it to the destination. The advantage is that you will always have the wires connected. But you can build the wires only in a straight line and that could be difficult over complex terrain and/or around stations and cities.
When connecting side line to an existing line it is advised to start FROM the existing line dragging away, rather than from remote industry dragging towards the existing line. That will ensure good connection between the main and side lines.

The large pole has reach of 4 squares in each direction (including diagonal), so you can cross maximum of 3 roads/tracks perpendicularly, but you can cross up to 6 tracks laid diagonally. The electrical poles cannot share a square with track, even if the track crosses just the corner of the square. But the poles can be built on half-squares where the other half is a rock.

The underwater cable nodes must be placed on neighbouring squares, so you need to prepare the underwater surface with bulldozer to eliminate any rocky areas (you CAN use bulldozer on underwater terrain)

Tools

Image	Tool	Cost	Reach (in squares)
	Small electrical pole	1 Timber Token	2
	Large electrical pole	1 Steel Token	4
	Underwater cable node	1 Steel Token	1
	Transformer station	500 Money tokens	4
	Erasing tool to delete pole	Free