I know its a buzz kill to wait but just wait if it takes an hour for Hazmat to arrive it takes and hour, I get islands having little chances for some of the larger calls but irl these calls can happen. The difference is irl in more rural and I mean rural like Scotland the key is not fire power but more education and prevention. I personally have a fully realistic set up with 5 min delays to retained stations and 1 min for full time, for me it makes the game more fun and a challenge instead of having everything arrive withing 5 min.
An hour is for within mainland on islands it is offen more for units to go from Mainland to Shetland takes 6+ hours.
Also as my set up has grew I get more large calls than small now so just saying oh wait an hour for it isn't really practical now is it given I would end up with a massive queue of calls waiting on specialist units, and then not generate more calls until I clear some.
I could go on about your view of how it is in real life here in Scotland but we will leave that there as you obviously do not know about the way it is here.
How do you suggest the call system can be improved for players in the most rural locations without massively reducing the amount of calls the player can get in those areas and causing players to get jobs spawn that have no large requirements which will mean players get financially punished in these areas? I know there are several places that are like this around the U.K. (Highlands and Islands, Northumbria, Cumbria, Cornwall etc) but I don’t think there is a majority of players in these areas for the very reason of the response times.
The majority will not play in these areas and whilst I would love to see the game work for all areas and players, I can’t see a way to easily change this without breaking the majority of players who don’t play in these areas setups.
There are valid points raised about realism that in real life the response times would also be extended in these areas.
I am genuinely curious though about ideas to improve this situation so please feel free to suggest some ideas here.
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it could be managed more by adding in area type system like the POI system where the "POI" is a large radius point (5km say) you can place on rural areas, urban areas, industrial areas ect.
Other way could be add a station category for when building stations so you can pick a rough type for where it is located. You could easily only have 4 categories as well,
Urban for stations within cities like Glasgow, London, Manchester ect
Suburban for smaller towns that can see a mix of calls you could have all calls on this set. (This could be the standard type)
Rural for stations in small villages and communities would have mostly calls related to that area.
Industrial this would be good for those areas that have more heavy industry and chemical sites like oil refineries and that near them.
You then just give each call a main classification priority so all areas could receive any call but would get more of the calls set for that area.
If "suburban" was used as the main category type and would operate as we have now.