Electrification
Game Manual
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The new power plants in 5th era have two functions. They create Electrical Tokens , used as fuel for electrical vehicles and for buying different industrial upgrades, and they create an Energy , used to power the industry giving extra production bonuses. To be able to power the industry, the player has to build electrical lines from power plant towards the industry.
Processes
Firstly, open the electrification building menu by clicking on
Please note the icon in right upper corner (red arrow) - that is overlay toggle button. You can turn the color overlay on/off. That button works separately for each building menu. It is strongly advised to have it on for building electrical network, it will help to avoid disconnected wires.
You can use 2 different electrical poles over the land, underwater cable to cross water areas (electrical poles are not possible to place on the bridges) and transformer station (it contains large electrical pole).
There are two ways of building the lines.
1) You can click and place each pole separately - that gives you the freedom of winding lines around difficult terrain, but could be time consuming and you have to be careful to place next pole within the reach area of the previous pole.
You can see that when placing next pole in correct position, the previous pole is bright white color
But if you try to place the next pole too far, the previous one is dark grey
2) Or you can use drag and drop method - place the first pole, drag to mouse to the destination. The advantage is that you will always have the wires connected. But you can build the wires only in straight line and that could be difficult over complex terrain and/or around stations and cities.
The large pole has reach 4 squares in each direction (including diagonal), so you can cross maximum of 3 roads/tracks perpendicularly, but you can cross up to 6 tracks laid diagonally. The electrical poles cannot share square with track, even if the track crosses just the corner of the square. But the poles can be built on half-squares where the other half is a rock.
The underwater cable nodes must be placed on neighbouring squares, so you need to prepare the underwater are with bulldozer to eliminate any rocky areas (you CAN use bulldozer on underwater terrain)
The base production process for the sawmill is shown below: