A very interesting mod and would love to try it. I am not a huge fan of placing so many power poles and have used a power grid of substations in city blocks to avoid it, and wondered how that might work with Fluidic Power. Such a grid works pretty well for vanilla, but the substations are a little too close, so this build I thought to try the Pole Ranger mod and expand the substation wire reach and supply area to 32... but Fluidic Power seems to cap the wire reach at 20. Would it be possible to make the wire reach configurable or accept the value set with Pole Ranger? Or maybe such a large supply area would not be very practical or functional?

I changed the wire reach in your mod and the supply area via the Pole Ranger mod. Currently, the reaches and areas are set as 8 and 16 for the small and medium poles and 32 for the substation. It does not seem to outright break your mod, but I wonder if changing the wire reach will incorrectly modify the calculations?

Hello! If you changed the values in fluid-poles.lua then it should work. You can test it in-game by placing two poles that far apart. If they connect (shows underground-pipe connection while placing, and draws green overlay line after placing), and you're able to run a circuit wire between the two poles, then they act as intended.

I'll see if I can add an option to support mods changing wire lengths. Will likely not be soon though because I first need to think of a modular way to do it, because I wasn't very consistent when changing the wire lengths myself.

Still early on (working on blue science researches), I have not yet implemented the high voltage/transformers yet. Currently using steam engines and able to push enough by using the big poles. So far it is working well, I have had to refactor a few times as I get the feel for it... very good game play. I very much like the increases to the poles, it has a significant impact on the number of poles, while I think leaving the intended fluid challenge. Still not sure what the "ideal" numbers might be, but so far this is working very well for me.

Reading a bit more in-depth on the fluid system, I find that it has some unexpected behaviors (or it used to). For example the order in-which you put down the pipes can have an impact of the fluid flow. Does Fluidic Power retain all of the detailed Factorio fluid flow behaviors? Such as the construction of lines outward from the source would be better than connecting lines toward the source, and the priority evaluation behavior at junctions?

Fluidic Power acts exactly as Factorio's fluid system because that's what it uses. You can read about how it works here if you want.

I'm not up-to-date with the current quirks of the Factorio fluid system though, but I do know that it's not ideal. In my experience if your pipes are full then it works mostly fine. It does mean that you need to produce slightly more than you need to maintain the back pressure, so precise ratios doesn't always work that well.

Ah, excellent thank you.

I opened an issue on github, not sure if you check there. It is concerning support (some working code included) for the Pole Ranger mod.

I didn't want to add support to a specific mod, and decided to go for a more generic approach. I made my change to the pole wire reach a startup setting which you can then disable. And if it's disabled it will use whatever the electric pole's wire reach is. So you can disable this feature.

It still depends on when Pole Ranger changes the lengths, but a quick look at the code shows that it does it before Fluidic Power creates the custom entities, so it should all work fine.

Excellent, thank you! This is working great, much appreciated.