I'm born in raised in the Rockies, and can wildfires are often 3-5 hours from any major civilization out here. Probably why I see more crew carriers and less engines out here.
Yep - we just gotta refine. I'd love it to be more complex than just creating an ARR and we send units. I think that why I play on and off over the years is I want more depth to the game mechanics.
Enjoy 
The thing with SWAT is, the maximum mission for them will only ever require 4 full SWAT vehicles. That’s not hard to count and plus, the SWAT Bearcat REQUIRES 6 personnel to operate. So, you are really not counting the personnel but the vehicle it’s self. I just can’t imagine counting out the amount of personnel needed for the mission say divided by 12. I know that a real wildfire can get up to 1,000+ personnel on scene so, I would like that function but it’s just not viable. If we put a 12 capacity operation on the Crew Carrier, that would be unrealistic. In real life we don’t always fill them and saying we send like 10 of them to a mission, Crew Carriers were never that popular anyways.
In reality though, the 1,000+ personnel fires are not that common as a percentage of total wildfires sparked each year. Maybe more often in CA and CO than the other western states, but in those states it is more common for structure to be threatened and it becomes about structure protection as opposed to just make sure it doesn't get out of control like a lot of fires in MT/WY/ID etc. It may be worth making the largest fires just take less personnel than in real life or just not having them in game. The fact that missions are points makes super large fire like the recent CA outbreak or the '18 CA fires not realistic for current game mechanics anyways.
I'd propose increasing the Crew Carrier to around 20 people as this is a fairly standard squad number based on my understanding (and this is what NWCG uses for its production hourly rates), and it is an easy number for math. Even if they aren't always filled in your experience, we need to find a way to simplify the idea if it is to be implement in the game, and I'm sure some crews do fill them or several of them (in fact, I know that, because the dorm I RAed for in my undergrad housed firefighters in the summer, and we did quite a bit of chatting during my time).
Quote from WinWinThe reason why that would not work is because we know people are going to use it to just upgrade fires and get more credits. All of them would make it so it’s the biggest it will get. And quite frankly some just may not have the resources so I don’t think I would want to be waiting for the mission to cancel because it got out of control.
I agree that the credits shouldn't increase because the player doesn't attack the fire. Perhaps a better way to do it would be to set it at the acreage, and not have it be expanded. Then the fires decrease in acreage with water, increase containment with personnel and dozers.
I know you say that the Crew Carrier wasn't popular anyways, but for amount that I have seen them in the summer in MT and WY for fighting fires, I'd say they are still used enough to justify having.
I do wish that the large wildland mission require more but having a personnel requirement although realistic in real life will not work here. I don’t want to sit around counting the personnel I send, do I? But I agree that we need more requirements for missions.
But would you need to count the personnel? We have this with SWAT, and we know that each SWAT AV holds 6 and the SUV 2-4 and we send appropriately. All we have to know is that a full carrier caries 12 individuals, T3/4 Engines 5 individuals, and whatever it is for 6/7s. Now without training, this gets much more difficult to count, so maybe we need a special training for Wildfire Hand Crews (carried by Crew Carriers or Wildland engines) and only persons with this training count for the person count?
Just had an idea... What if the water requriements were deleted. Still with me? Ok so now, what if a bar (like the water required one) is added, but for two things. How many acres it has burned and the containment percantage. If you don't have enough units on scene, the acreage will increase and the containment will decrease.... If you have a lot of units on scene the conatinment will increase and the acreage will start to slow down. Don't be afraid to make suggestions to my suggestion
We could take that farther. Water Brought to the scene, either via air tanker, ground tanker, or engine could in turn affect the acreage bar. Crew Carriers with the Wildfire Hand Crew Training I mentioned to WinWin as well as the new dozer units could affect containment. The job ends once acreage reaches 0 and containment reaches 100%. If acreage is increasing, the it is likely that containment will also decrease as well.
but the Dozer also has an existence justification. If the dozer is on site, the mission is 2% faster. Per dozer it is 2% each. If there are 3 dozers on site, the mission is 6% faster.
So this is my understanding of the crew carrier as well - that it speeds up Wildland missions. Are these the same (2% per dozer / full carrier) or is the mechanics a little bit different?
Adding a crew requirement would make the crew carrier more useful for sure. I like the idea!
Thank you Rescue and Sanni! I think there are missions that would be appropriate to require a bulldozer, such as containment lines, so hopefully we see that soon!
The possible missions page is really clunky and hard to use - and really, as someone who works for an online magazine publisher, it shouldn't be. At bare minimum, I'd like to see it be able to be sorted by the following:
- Expansions Required
- POI (and why do missions need to be repeated? Why can't they just say POIs: x,y,z)
- Money required
- Units required
This would take some time to redo, but it could be made far more useful than it is.
Speaking of Dozer operations, are there any missions that require it at this point?
My argument against this is the airfields already have to have enough foam to deal with an incident involving the largest aircraft that it’s certified to handle as an international standard. So I don’t see why you would need x amount of foam as LAX for example will already have enough. For the wildfires it works because you may need to call additional resources but you shouldn’t need to at an airfield.
The airfields store all of this stuff yes, but most (if not all airports) still require them to be transported to the scene of the accident, which is sometimes outside of the airfield. In addition, some rural airports are serviced by the local fire department and the vehicle and retardants will sometimes need to be taken to the scene of the accident.
I guess part of this is I just want the requirements to be more in depth (for everything really) than send X vehicles. I love how SWAT counts personnel and the wildfires now have a water requirement and I'd love to see similar things added where it makes sense.
HRET systems still are not common enough to have a requirement in my opinion. I know airfields that handle the largest of aircraft (Boeing 747’s and B-52’s) and they still don’t yet have a HRET.
For vehicles that not every place has, perhaps they just exist for people who want to role-play more, or are only required on massive missions? For example - the game is perfectly playable without using type 2,4-7 engines, but they are there as options for us.
Rapid Intervention Vehicle isn’t necessarily a bad idea however at a lot of airfields they just have the domestic and then the crash trucks. RIV’s are a little outdated now. They were very popular in a time where the crash trucks were slow lumbering beasts but they are no longer like this.
I've still seen them in use here in the states. Maybe they are functioning more as command vehicles at this point?
Chemical tanker. Again, my point comes back to them being not that widespread. Crash trucks have to have a certain amount of dry chemical per regs so they tend to already have that and you don’t then have an additional tanker.
They aren't widespread, but they certainly exist. The more apparatus, the better as far as I am concerned!
The only downside to this would be, what is the point of having a small ARFF and a large one? This may be just harder to make than what it would give.
Same issue with the Wildland update. What is the point of the type 7 engine other than to imitate real life? There really isn't one. This just adds the same variety to the airport stuff.
I'd love to see the in-game ARFF expansion have more vehicles, as opposed to a general ARFF.
- Crash Tenders [both in 4x4 / 6x6 / 8x8 chasis that hold varying amounts of foam / chemical retardant]
- Dragons [These are Tenders with an extended boom nozzle for fighting fires]
- RIVs [first attack, rapid intervention vehicles]
- Chemical Tanker
In terms of mechanics, The FAA requires airports to have various numbers equipment standards based on the length of aircraft that the airport services. These include both chemical agents and foam agents. Both of these could have gallon requirements like the new forestry update has. This would add to the realism and make the game feel more interesting in this regard.
Feel free to help refine this idea. I'm not a fire fighter, just a nerd :).
No UK doesn’t have any of those expansions. Airport we want to do it differently and SWR seems to have got lost somewhere haha. I don’t want to see any version get left behind and the leader will always be the German game
I'm actually ambivalent to the existence of the German game, and as someone who Is bilingual, I'd be interested to see the link to the game / forums...
Thanks TACR!
Do you think the medical side (and maybe expanded airports) will be finished on the US version, or do you think because the UK version is being built with a fuller development team and doesn't have the years of player expectation it will likely become the leader feature wise.
I'm assuming the UK version doesn't have a forestry / SWR / Airport extensions as the US version does.
I'll have to try the UK version out soon.
Thanks for the response TACR, although that doesn't really provide me with any new info. It would be super great if the Devs published a more comprehensive change log for all of this stuff so that we could compare, but that isn't your fault so thanks for taking the Time,
Have you figured out what the new water system entails?
Hello,
I have been play MCUS off and on for about a year and enjoying myself. I was wondering what the primary similarities and differences are between the UK and US versions of the game, and what the differences in features are, as well as which one is being developed most intentionally.
- CTF
