Prevent electric poles from mistakenly merging isolated networks

[SupplyDepoo]

TL;DR

When an electric pole is built, copper cables should not auto-connect to an existing pole if the resulting network would contain a power switch that loops back on itself.

What ?

I suggest a smarter behavior for electric pole auto-connect, which helps to preserve desired electric network separation.

The following logic should prevent the accidental merging of electric networks that were previously separated by a player with one or more power switches bridging them.

1. When a pole is built, it should check each possible connection to nearby existing poles or ghost poles, and make a list of those electric networks.
2. The list should be checked to see if any two networks are bridged by a power switch (enabled or disabled does not matter).
3. When not, the poles should auto-connect with copper cable (respecting connections in blueprints) as normal.
4. When yes, the poles should NOT auto-connect.

In placement mode (using a blueprint or with a pole item in hand) the same logic should be followed, and those copper cable connections which will not be made as a result of this logic should be rendered with a dashed line.

Finally, after the pole is built (or ghosted in 2.0), the player can manually connect electric poles as they wish. Even with a large blueprint that was built within range of two mutually isolated networks, this would typically only be one action.

One small extra tweak to this idea could be that when dragging poles it would entirely ignore poles on a different network (bridged via power switch), so that pole-dragging would continue uninterrupted.

Why ?

Keeping electric networks isolated currently requires a lot of attention, and mistakes can be difficult to notice immediately. Often these networks are bridged by power switches, so this suggestion would alleviate some of the burden.