This study investigates the potential of using transmission power control in wireless packet networks with differing number of hops between source and destination. Here we exploit the benefits of power control in the context of multi-hop wireless ad hoc type networks with a distributed media access control. For our investigations we choose several general ad hoc network topologies and studied the effect of power control with respect to energy consumption and network capacity. We show that power control largely improves the network capacity and energy savings in all investigated scenarios, and that utilizing a greater number of intermediate hops between base source and destination improves the energy savings, but often causes a tradeoff in capacity, depending on the network topology scenarios