Factorio Forums

Walking while holding down the mouse button with a power pole selected will normally place a series of poles at the maximum connectable distance. However, if there are any existing power poles near your cursor that have been marked for deconstruction, you will not place any new power poles.

This was discovered while tearing down wooden poles and trying to replace them with big steel poles.

On a related note, if there are any power-using entities that have been marked for deconstruction along your path, additional power poles will be placed in an attempt to power these entities (even though they are marked for removal!).

Thanks for the report. As far as I know nobody has ever decided that entities/poles marked for deconstruction should be treated differently than non-marked ones for electric pole purposes. The game doesn't make a difference anywhere as far as I can remember.

So, with that said I'm making the decision that this is working how we want it to work and we're not going to be changing it.