They will drive quite far and as long as you do the roads right so traffic flows instead of stalling, they will usually get to the fire before it's too late.

But 36 fire stations for one zone doesn't sound right. In low risk areas it usually doesn't matter if the coverage is a bit meh, while you need perfect coverage in high risk areas. The fire helicopters from Natural Disasters help a lot with coverage if you combine them with the firewatch towers, but if you don't have the DLC your only option is to be generous with the fire stations.ĭo pay attention to the fire risk vs the coverage overlays, though. I do believe that if the buildings had realistic coverage, you would end up only needing 1 fire station for the entire city, which just doesn't work with how the game mechanics work otherwise.Įach small fire station only has 1 engine, the big one has 2, and that combined with the engines getting stuck in traffic means you do need a lot of them all over the place to cover everything, especially in a big city. You can up the fire dept budget past 100% to increase the range slightly, but overall it is very small by design.

The range looks very small, yes, but they will drive anywhere they can reach.