Running the Services

Police, fire department and hospital all follow the same rules. Understand them once and you can run all three.

Costs hour by hour

The services cost money continuously, and these are exactly the costs that can push you into the red. Payment happens every full hour in advance, automatically. The costs are made up of the station itself, staff wages and vehicle upkeep. Pilots earn more than police officers, firefighters or paramedics. The "Staff" block lists every wage group and shows the total per hour and per day in large print.

If money runs short, only that one hour is closed. Only a small emergency service nearby keeps working. The next hour pays automatically again.

The build menu shows the running costs of the smallest sensible setup before you build.

Staff

You choose the vehicles and the crew comes with them. Only doctors and emergency doctors at the hospital are hired directly. New vehicles cost a purchase fee, some also cost metal. Reducing them gives you nothing back.

Reach

Each service works within a circle around its building, which you see as a holo circle when you click it. The base reach grows with the vehicles. On top of that:

• Premium: +25%
• research Emergency Range: one tile per level

Use the slider to shrink the reach. In the preview the circle shows gains in green and losses in red. A smaller area means fewer cases, a large one in a full city means overload.

Power

Without power no service works. Services are supplied first, all or nothing: hospital, fire department, police (Power and Distribution).

Pause

The ⏸ switch shuts a service down. It then costs nothing and needs no power, but it does not protect anything either. Switching it back on pays the current hour immediately.

Performance

How well a service protects its tiles is measured over the last 24 game hours: how many cases were there and how many of them went wrong (Incidents and Failures)? If nothing happened, performance is full. For fire department and hospital, how fast they reach the scene counts as well.

Statistics and history

• Statistics: today and yesterday, with Premium a whole week, plus recommendations
• History: charts over 48 hours, 7 or 30 days, for example crime, fires, patients, deaths, calls and costs
• Daily log: every important case with its time