Demand grows with production
Energy demand does not depend only on how many buildings you own. Most of the load comes from the actual speed of the line, so everything that makes the factory faster, its level, the gin, modernisation, also makes the bill larger. Building one round of transformers and forgetting the system does not work for that reason.
Demand also moves with the season: winter adds a heating load. A site that runs comfortably in autumn can fall into deficit in winter.
The brownout is a silent slowdown
When supply does not meet demand the game does not cut the power. It slows production proportionally. That is a brownout, and its sneakiness is exactly this: nothing halts, everything simply takes longer.
So a share of all the "I upgraded and nothing changed" reports are really an energy deficit. If you have just bought several modernisations in a row, look at the power side.
Where power comes from
| Source | Character |
|---|---|
| Supply included with the land | Free starting capacity, stops being enough |
| Grid connection | Reliable, a fixed rate per kilowatt |
| Generator | Runs on diesel, the most expensive kilowatt |
| Solar panel | No fuel cost, depends on season and daylight |
| Battery | Stores by day, gives back at night |
At day close the bill is paid in this order: solar first because it is free, then grid, diesel last. Installing solar therefore shrinks the diesel bill directly.
Selling to the grid is not a money printer. You can sell surplus energy, but the sale price is deliberately kept below the purchase price. Building panels to earn money is a closed door; the job of solar is to lower the bill.
The electric fleet
Machines normally burn diesel. Convert them and that expense moves from the diesel bill into the energy system. How much you gain depends entirely on your energy mix: on grid power it lands below diesel, on solar it is close to free.
In exchange, your fleet joins the same queue as the factory. If supply is already tight, an electric fleet can deepen a brownout. A single charging station is also not enough for a large fleet; it needs upgrading.
Facilities: each one strengthens a single system
| Facility | What it strengthens |
|---|---|
| Irrigation / water tank | Crop growth rate |
| Canteen | Worker speed and unit cost |
| Dormitory | Headcount (beds per level) |
| Gin | Production speed and unit cost |
| Maintenance workshop | Fire and breakdown risk |
| Quality lab | Order payments |
| Logistics centre | Delivery time |
| Office | Order frequency |
| R&D | Makes every upgrade cheaper |
| Billboard | Customer flow |
| Landscaping | Daily reputation |
Facilities saturate
Facility benefits do not grow forever. Each has a ceiling and most saturate between levels 4 and 10. When one does, the panel prints maximum and refuses further upgrades.
The panel also shows the current effect, so you can read what you are really getting rather than the "+7% per level" on the badge. Those two numbers can differ a lot, because the effects compound on each other.