Ok, I think I’m starting to see the issue now. One thing I’ve missed is that the “tiny” amount Germany is importing yearly is actually half of the consumption South Sweden. That sure puts a bit of stress on the system.

I’ll say that I’m still not fully convinced due to the lack of concrete numbers, but it’s something I’ll keep in mind in the future.

I can’t find a way to dodge the paywall to that article, but the short blurb I was able to translate, makes it sound like my guess is at least part of the problem:

As long as the sun shines the most, Skåne benefits from cheap solar energy from our neighboring countries. As soon as solar energy declines, the price of electricity rises throughout Southern Sweden. The poor Swedish transmission capacity means that we cannot benefit from cheap northern hydropower.

That said, I do agree that Germany should’ve long been split into two zones, at least until transmission capacity catches up. But alas, most people in Germany don’t even recognize that the lack of transmission capacities as the source of the problem and rather blame it on us importing expensive electricity from France.

It’s actually those parallels why I’m so distrustful: I’m far from an expert on the topic, quite the opposite if anything, but given how many people, even politicians, put out even dumber claims much more confidently, I’m always wary about such statements.

Based on the article, it seems more like that’s more of a problem of south Sweden just having a big energy deficit in general, not as a result of imports/exports or the actions of Germany particular.

The way I understand it, it’s more that a new connection just wouldn’t make sense because Germany already has a problem from moving energy from its own offshore wind parks in the north to the south.

I couldn’t find a good article explaining the current energy situation in south Sweden, but looking at ElectrityMaps, I’d guess that part of the problem is that there’s a huge amount of nuclear energy being produced in South Central Sweden, saturating the grid and making the transfer of cheap hydro and wind energy from the northern Zones difficult.

Those three really are the holy trinity of factory games IMO and it’s quite insane that we’re getting all of them in what’s essentially a quarter of a year.

Also the perfect order with the most relaxing one releasing first and the biggest and challenging one last.

After that we totally need one of those cross-game tech-tree randomizers for these games. That’d be quite a challenge.

I’m not sure I follow? According to this chart the import from Sweden to Germany is almost negligible.

Sweden, Finland, Lithuania and Poland all seem to be bigger net importers.

That’s assuming people actually use a parser and don’t build their own “parser” to read values manually.

And before anyone asks: Yes, I’ve known people who did exactly that and to this day I’m still traumatized by that discovery.

But yes, comments would’ve been nice.

On one hand I agree, on the other hand I just know that some people would immediately abuse it and put relevant data into comments.

At the very least it failed in a way that’s obvious by giving you contradictory statements. If it left you with only the wrong statements, that’s when “AI” becomes really insidiuos.

It’s a little bit faster for encoding and decoding

On the other hand, the time spent uploading/downloading much smaller files probably more than makes up for that, although even that difference might get pretty small with modern internet connections.

As much as I’d like to see this game preserved, I don’t think the dev can be held responsible when they’re refunding everyone who purchased the game.