There seems to be a problem with wire circuits behind transformers and the "strained" yellow status in the electricity overlay. It seems that regardless of power supply and demand circuits "behind" transformers are always marked as strained when powered.
As I understand it the strained status is supposed to indicate a circuit has more power demand than what is supplied to it, basically telling the player they need to add more generators. This works fine when you're starting out with a simple single circuit with the same wire and everything connected to it. But the "strained" status only seems to take into account batteries and generators, not transformers. So at least in my experience circuits that are isolated from the generators and batteries by a transformer are always shown as strained. If this is by design it's confusing as the "strained" status now doesn't tell the player anything useful about the "outer" circuits beyond transformers, and may even incorrectly make the player believe there's a power shortage.
On a related note, the "strained" status could also be a little confusing to players as there are two different types of strain on electrical wiring in the game it could refer to. Both the power supply deficit it now indicates (supply strain), and the overload strain of having a peak wattage that is over the maximum allowed wattage for the cable type. While the supply strain is now indicated (only incorrectly for circuits beyond transformers) the overload strain is not indicated at all as far as I can tell (until something overloads). And for circuits outside the transformers I'd say that the overload strain is usually more relevant to the player (to tell them they need to change cables or rewire things to more separate circuits). So perhaps it would be a good idea to try and indicate both these types of strain separately in the electrical overlay in some way?
As an illustration, when I started understanding the wires had a wattage limit I immediately thought this was what the "strained" status referred too. When I then understood it related to supply and demand I was already solving the overload problem with transformers, which then as described above made the strained status confusing again as all circuits outside the transformers were marked as strained.
Connect a wired circuit to something that consumes power to a generator/battery via a transformer.
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A developer has marked this issue as fixed. This means that the issue has been addressed in the current development build and will likely be in the next update.
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