Circuit load calculation is wrong

[Kasuha]

I'm posting this as feedback since I assume this is working as intended, just the intent was wrong.

See the picture. The mouse is pointing at the yellow part of the wire at the top line. That sewing machine is off, it is consuming no electricity. But even if it was on, there's not more than 240 W possibly going through that wire, definitely not 840 W the game is reporting. That's the sum of all immediately active consumers connected anywhere on the grid.

Now, I know that calculating load on each part of a grid is not easy, particularly if the grid contains loops (it's fairly simple for a non-looping tree-like structure like the one I use). But I would suggest either implementing a (semi-)proper calculation of load on the grid, or completely dropping the idea of two different wattages and wire damage on overload. The current implementation is not just "game physics", it is plain wrong and prevents building a power network throughout a large enough base. Especially since Heavi-Wire wattage is just twice that of normal wire.

[Hole]

Yes! And if it is too much to ask then I suggest at least adding a transformer so we can separate low draw grids from high draw grids.

[SchlauFuchs]

I agree, running into the same kind of problem.

Attn devs: A correct calculation would be for each active consumer to calculate the power consumed from each active power producer and add that to each piece of wire between the producer and the consumer. When there is a path fork&join between the source and the sink, the power needs to be divided by the number of paths on wire tiles between the forks. The power needs to be signed to mark the direction of the current, so that consumers between sources (P-C-C-P) would not cause wrong power indication between them. But I guess, you have implemented this using agents model, like with water (sounds over-engineered). In this case you need to make the wire pieces an event receiver that the "power" agent notifies on passing and the sum of their power notifications per second determines the load.

The wire heat generation then is determined by the net load times wire material resistance.

TBH this game is so much fun I would almost let me be hired by Klei to implement this

 

 

[AlexRou]

I'm actually thinking of using some pathfinding algos to try and work this out  

[Luponius]

Yeah I was wondering why wires kept breaking in areas I left with low watt wire which I knew would never pull in more than what a single device would need...  It would also be interesting to have transformers and some form of load balancing implemented.