[1.1.81] Power poles fail to connect if ghost is inbetween

[Festmester]

Hi, I just found a strange behaviour to power poles. I have always had the impression that power poles of all kinds will always connect in a way that makes them functional, but not always to every pole within reach.

But I just experienced a substation wouldn't connect to another substation if there is already a ghost of another power pole in between them. This can have annoying effects on the process of building.

It is true for all power poles; placing medium poles with the correct distance between them will fail if the ghost of another is already in between first.

Steps:
Place power pole which connects to a source of power (for example medium electric pole)
Place a ghost immediately next to it (away from the main source?)
Place a real pole next to the ghost.

Result: The newest pole will not have power despite being 2 tiles from a powered pole and in each other's grids

pole.png (153.74 KiB) Viewed 921 times

Practical example:

example poles.png (1.53 MiB) Viewed 921 times

[boskid]

Thanks for the report however i am not considering this to be a bug. Ghosts are primarily used for construction robots so this state is expected to be a temporary until a robot builds an electric pole. If you have no robots then it may be a good idea to not use ghosts. A logic that would try to ignore ghosts if there are real poles in range would create various build order dependencies in connected wires and i do not want that.

[Festmester]

That makes sense. I've just played the game for many years and never seen a build not work because of a ghost power pole, so I considered it to be a new behaviour. I have frankensteined many builds from partial stamps with and without construction robots for planning of builds, and never seen it not connect in the way I saw today. I also believe that putting down ghosts in early game is a legit way of planning out a build, and at some point the crossover from small to medium poles might create this scenario quite often, and again, something I've never seen before today.

The "practical example" actually happened because I cut+pasted to move the setup around to beacon it, it moved the small poles to the trash slots and it connected in a way that prevented the substations to connect properly. I was wondering this for a while, how half the setup didn't have power while the other half did, despite everything clearly being in range. The fact that there was a small pole ghost ruining it really surprised me

Thanks for checking it out though

[Festmester]

Testing in 1.0.0, this behaviour did not exist back then. It would simply prioritize the poles that existed and leave the ghost unconnected. I wonder what changed

1.0 test.png (535.92 KiB) Viewed 896 times

Edit - Back to 1.1.81:
By the looks of it it may even prioritize connections to ghosts over real poles

ghost prio.png (390.26 KiB) Viewed 894 times

[boskid]

Power pole connections are saved in the blueprint. They still auto connect to other poles outside the blueprint.

Since 1.1.0 made copper connections saved in blueprints, ghosts had to persist those connections once built. By making ghosts keep connections a lot of build order issues were fixed, just what this bug report asks to reintroduce.