A better alarm (louder) when being attacked?

[jpinard]

I get so entrenched in building I don't notice anything else as the sound is so subtle I always miss when one of my satellite sites is being overrun.

Is there a mod to give you a better alarm?

[knighttemplar1960]

You can use wires and a speaker to make your own alarm. If you set the wire to read the contents of an ammo box and use belts to supply your turrets you can set the alarm to go off when ammo < X. The speaker may be enough to get your attention so that you can check out the alerts before the red or yellow exclamation mark vanishes.

[Nailfoot]

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

You can use wires and a speaker to make your own alarm. If you set the wire to read the contents of an ammo box and use belts to supply your turrets you can set the alarm to go off when ammo < X. The speaker may be enough to get your attention so that you can check out the alerts before the red or yellow exclamation mark vanishes.

Make sure you use the global playback option if you do this.

Alerts have their own volume slider, make sure yours is turned all the way up.

[jpinard]

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

You can use wires and a speaker to make your own alarm. If you set the wire to read the contents of an ammo box and use belts to supply your turrets you can set the alarm to go off when ammo < X. The speaker may be enough to get your attention so that you can check out the alerts before the red or yellow exclamation mark vanishes.

What about for laser turrets? IS there a way for it to read it's being used and then activate the alarm?

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by jpinard:

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

You can use wires and a speaker to make your own alarm. If you set the wire to read the contents of an ammo box and use belts to supply your turrets you can set the alarm to go off when ammo < X. The speaker may be enough to get your attention so that you can check out the alerts before the red or yellow exclamation mark vanishes.

What about for laser turrets? IS there a way for it to read it's being used and then activate the alarm?

If you wire accumulators that you keep specifically to run those laser turrets. You would have to isolate them from the rest of your electrical network and use power switches. It would be more complicated to set up and you wouldn't be able to fine tune it as well but it should work.

There's a thread on this page or perhaps the next one about someone setting up an accumulator transformer set up that might work to do this. You could also do this with dedicated steam tanks and turbines for power delivering steam by train when needed and then read the steam tanks for the alarms which would be, once again, much more complicated but should in theory work. I haven't really played around with lasers much. I only use them at corners. Everywhere else is flame throwers and gun turrets. When properly set up they can handle max evolution biters and spitters and they don't fail (merely slow down) if your base has a brown out.

[Nailfoot]

Originally posted by jpinard:

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

You can use wires and a speaker to make your own alarm. If you set the wire to read the contents of an ammo box and use belts to supply your turrets you can set the alarm to go off when ammo < X. The speaker may be enough to get your attention so that you can check out the alerts before the red or yellow exclamation mark vanishes.

What about for laser turrets? IS there a way for it to read it's being used and then activate the alarm?

You could set an alarm when your system runs low on repair packs, robots, walls, etc. You could have a train automatically resupply, too.

But obviously that's only helpful once you have robots to automatically repair.

[Danub]

You need to have separate accumulators for the laser turrets. You can just have one along with the laser turrets on their own grid which you connect to your main grid through a power shutoff. You don't even need a latch for it, you just connect the grids if the charge is bellow 100%. Though, I expect that with logic update delays you'll get blackouts so having a decent number of accumulators instead of just one should do the trick.
Gun turrets deal ridiculous dmg with nuclear ammo, by the way. They dish out way more dps than laser turrets. 240 dmg/s against 30 dmg/s for laser turrets without any upgrades on either. At lvl 10 dmg upgrade and max shooting speed upgrade, my gun turrets are dealing 11400 dmg/s at the cost of 2.5 ammo/s

[Purpleganja]

I wonder, how would you read the difference between shooting discharge from passive drain discharge when reading the isolated accumulator? I can imagine some ways, but it seems too complex to be worth it.

Maybe just put a gun or flamethrower turret for easier reading. Also, it doesn't hurt to put flamethrower turrets with your laser turrets.. oh well it does hurt the bitters very much;)