Smarter Firefighters: Improved AI

Smarter Firefighters improves firefighter AI by instructing fire trucks and helicopters to prioritize nearby fires. The result is a much more effective firefighting response that can contain actively spreading fires.

Have you ever wondered why large portions of your city will burn down even when you have plenty of firefighters on scene responding to the fire? Do you find it almost impossible to prevent forested areas of your city from being destroyed when a forest fire strikes no matter how many fire trucks and helicopters you have? Do you find your city burning down much more frequently than it should after purchasing the Natural Disasters DLC? These are all a result of the somewhat underdeveloped firefighting AI used in the game.

The firefighter AI used in Cities Skylines assigns each firefighter to a new fire without much consideration for distance during large fire events that involve many buildings. What this means is that an individual fire truck or helicopter may finish putting out a fire on one side of the city only to be assigned to another fire all of the way across the city even if there is another burning building a few meters away. This worked well in the original release of the game when fires did not spread aggressively. However, with the new forest fire mechanics and more aggressive fire spread introduced by the Natural Disasters DLC, this results in fire vehicles racing back and forth between distant fires instead of putting out nearby fires before moving on to other more distant fires. In practice, this means you cannot prevent large fires from destroying many buildings no matter how many firefighting vehicles you have, making fire a somewhat unfair game mechanic.

This mod simply instructs idle fire vehicles (returning to the station or waiting for another target) to look for nearby fires to extinguish. If no nearby fires are found, the default firefighter AI is used to find the next fire to respond to. This small change produces a dramatic improvement that allows firefighters to contain a fire that is actively spreading. In addition, since fewer firefighters spend time bouncing back and forth between multiple fires, it makes firefighters more effective at fighting simultaneous fires in different parts of your city.

With this mod, if you have enough firefighters and they can make it to the site of the fire, they will be able to contain the fire and prevent additional buildings from burning down. Now you can build a dirty, fire-hazard of an industrial district or a nice, heavily-wooded residential district without constantly losing large numbers of buildings to fires. Make firefighting fun again!

This mod uses a very lightweight script so shouldn’t have a large impact on game performance.

• This mod does not change fire spread mechanics or fire intensity in any way. Your city will still burn down if firefighters cannot get to a fire.
• This mod does not change emergency vehicle pathfinding or driving behavior (e.g. cars pull over for emergency vehicles).
• This mod does not alter the offer matching logic used to assign fire vehicles to fires. You may still see fire vehicles responding to fires far from their home station. For better matchmaking logic, consider using a mod like Enhanced District Services or More Effective Transfer Manager, which should both be compatible with this mod.

This mod uses Harmony so should be compatible with just about any other mod. This mod also implements the AI changes in a very compatible way so it is expected be compatible with other mods that modify firefighter AI, vehicle AI, pathfinding AI, and just about any other mod.

Known Compatible Mods (not an exhaustive list, just the most popular known compatible mods that alter AI)

• TMPE
• Real Time
• More Effective Transfer Manager

Incompatible Mods

There are no known incompatibilities. This mod uses Harmony so should be compatible with just about any other mod. This mod also implements the AI changes in a very compatible way so it is expected be compatible with other mods that modify firefighter AI, vehicle AI, pathfinding AI, and just about any other mod.

Saved Game Compatibility

This mod does not modify your saved game in any way. It should be safe to enable/disable/install/uninstall at any time.

View the source code on Github. [github.com] Pull requests, issues, and other comments are welcome!

This mod would not be possible without the excellent Harmony patching library [github.com] by Andreas Pardeike and Cities Skylines Harmony API [github.com] by boformer.

Please rate this mod if you find it useful so others may find it as well! Feedback is always welcome! Please use the dedicated discussion thread for bug reports.