Bottlenecks

[rovaira2]

I love this game, but one feature I can do without is Bottlenecks (electricity). It's a pain in the but to try and get the lines all connected, etc. sometimes.

[mikelleh63]

Just look at the bottleneck, put down a couple transformers on either side of the bottleneck, connect them undrground or by wire, done.

[rovaira2]

Ill try that, but I think the tutorial says to put them ahead of the bottleneck or something like that.

[Aieonae]

Originally posted by mikelleh63:

Just look at the bottleneck, put down a couple transformers on either side of the bottleneck, connect them undrground or by wire, done.

I am thinking the same…

[Sid1701d]

Bottleneck electricity is part of what a real city has to deal with all the time, that is why they got huge transformer stations to store the electricity until its needed. Normal neighborhoods for single family residence use a single substation, with 125/240 buried underground cables for each house in the neighborhood. The 125 runs the lights and the ac outlets the other ones run your stove and refrigerator and garage power has a 240 plug for things like tools. However, AC electricity is in a constant on/off at the same time, the up is + and down is negative - If they didn't keep a little bit in the line, when application called for it, it would take too long for the electricity to get their, so they send a single high volt followed by a single low volt, so the the volts range from high to low volts, computers have converter boxes in them to convert the ac electricity into a more manageable form for them to use without damaging the highly sensitive computer components, without that converter the high volt low volt of AC electricity would kill every computer on the grid in minutes.

[jacko_2110]

Originally posted by rovaira2:

Ill try that, but I think the tutorial says to put them ahead of the bottleneck or something like that.

Just run an underground low voltage wire to another road to spread the load before the bottleneck... It's quite simple.

[Walker Evans]

Taken to planning it like a simplified version of the road network.

Power flows from generation to the transformer and out from there so when the transformer gets overloaded, the bottleneck shows in which direction(s), so plop another transformer somewhere in the network in the rough direction of the bottleneck and hook it up. A lot like fixing a traffic bottleneck.

Taken to designating a specific depth for the high voltage lines so they don't interfere with anything else underground and planning a sort of backbone from the generator along the rough length of the city, although I have tended to build in staggered strips rather than grids so that approach might not work for everyone.

edit: read that again and found that it was needlessly difficult. hoping this clumsy diagram would be easier:

   |  /
   |/
G--T--
   x\
     \

x marks the bottleneck
T, transformer

fix:
   |  /
   |/
G--T--
  \|\
   T \

[Aieonae]

Originally posted by Sid1701d:

Bottleneck electricity is part of what a real city has to deal with all the time, that is why they got huge transformer stations to store the electricity until its needed. Normal neighborhoods for single family residence use a single substation, with 125/240 buried underground cables for each house in the neighborhood. The 125 runs the lights and the ac outlets the other ones run your stove and refrigerator and garage power has a 240 plug for things like tools. However, AC electricity is in a constant on/off at the same time, the up is + and down is negative - If they didn't keep a little bit in the line, when application called for it, it would take too long for the electricity to get their, so they send a single high volt followed by a single low volt, so the the volts range from high to low volts, computers have converter boxes in them to convert the ac electricity into a more manageable form for them to use without damaging the highly sensitive computer components, without that converter the high volt low volt of AC electricity would kill every computer on the grid in minutes.

I think you gotten some concept blurred a transformer is just to deal with conversion of Voltage alone as to reduce grid loss while doing power transmission.

Also technically, AC don't really go on or off, it's just out of phase, it's like shooting a electron and it miss it's trajectory, so no target hit registers.

In practice, in a sub station it's actually the opposite as it presents a stand-by load to balance the entire grid preventing outage and surge in both ways for safety reasons, while functions like a water tap.

Yes power providers literally runs an array series of industrial electrical motors to generate the load to balance the grid safely, while consumer skims whenever they need by slowing the motorized load to fit the occasion.

There are another technology that does store huge amount of power with HVDC was the super capacitor project, that actually tie with the game representation of emergency batteries.

[rovaira2]

I tend to fix mine, but only for a while before it pops up again. I'm not exactly sure where to place the transformer each time. Should they be placed in the direction the power flows? I'll have to look at the directions next time I get that issue.

[ryguy216]

For anyone struggling with this make sure you have two road connections for each transformer. Transformers cap at 80mw whereas roads cap at 40mw. You'll be missing out on have of the performance of your transformers without that second connection