Power Sags instead of Instant Blackout

[Didact04]

When real electronics don't get sufficient power, they don't instantly click off. Instead, they run at a portion of their efficiency proportional to the total amount of electricity they are receiving over the power they require to run at full capacity. Total blackouts don't happen unless power straight up stops flowing, like a line gets hit and an entire section of city is without power. Insufficient power over a network creates a brownout, or power sag.

During a power sag, things run less efficiently. This would give a player enough time to deal with the situation since their colony can kind of function in this state, and also allow them to more or less maintain productivity as opposed to being unable to do anything until there's enough power to run everything at 100%.

Furthermore, it would also make battery banks more representative of what they are in real life: a buffer. Not a true storage. When your batteries are out, power is still flowing through them, it's just not accumulating. This is not the case in this game, where insufficient power is functionally equivalent to no power.

This would also make hydroponics in particular a more attractive option, since their biggest downfall is that if you ever don't have power to everything in your entire grid at 100%, your crop is dead at the drop of a hat and you can't really do anything about it.

All in all I think my suggestion would solve a lot of problems the game's current power system has and would increase quality of life for the player, as well as having the added bonus of better reflecting reality.