Factorio Forums

Searched the forums and was surprised to find no other suggestions on this subject.

TL;DR

Increase the usefullness of lamps beyond only being able to see your base better during the night.

What ?

Decrease range of base defenses during the night unless lamps are present nearby. Lamps will show a radius circle when in the cursor, similar to turrets. Turrets will have a radius circle for day and one for night. When a tile is within the day radius circle of a turret AND a radius circle of a lamp, the turret will fire at enemies in that tile during the night. Otherwise the turret will only fire at enemies in it's night radius circle.

The radius circle of the lamp is bigger than the area that the lamp visually actually lights up, this can be seen as realistic because in real life the light degrades very gradually and will be able to reveal movement from far away. This prevents that the lamp needs to be placed far out in the field.

Why ?

I usually refrain from using lamps because they draw a significant amount of power from the grid and don't offer any real benefit, especially when the player is not present in the area where they are placed.

Sounds like an idea better suited for a mod.

I think it's a good idea. Perhaps biters should be more likely to attack unlit parts of the base as well. Cover of darkness and so forth.

or maybe make the biters attack lamps to bring back the dark of the night!

Lamps as biter "Bait" sounds like the more interesting idea to me. That said, it's also fine to have them be only situationally useful, and not for everyone. I frequently made lamps work as signals about the health of my factory - like, blueprints would feature warning lights if my accumulators had recently dipped below 20%, or if a standard blueprint was improperly hooked up to my global circuit network.

Use a Darker Nights mod and lamps become mandatory