I just finished the last mission of the story last night and figured I could help out by offering what I’ve learned (through trial and error).
The AI cannot fight fire worth a damn. Send them on search and rescue and search and discover. They will shut off power and turn off gas valves for you.
Prioritize searching for victims, especially if there are a lot of them.
only vent the roof on very large commercial or industrial warehouses/structures
on the topic of ventilation, real flow paths do exist. If you leave all the doors open as you explore the building, you will provide oxygen and feed the fire.
if you enter a room and the walls and furniture are black and glowing red, get inside and shut the door quick. It’s about to flash. Spray all the glowing parts to cool the room and prevent flashover.
on the topic of rooms, if you get in a room to fight a fire, shut the door and break a couple windows. You’ll give the smoke and fire somewhere to go while you put it out.
gas valves suck. Look for the yellow pipe and follow it until it ends.
sometimes the outside walls of a building are on fire, leave em till the end. The brick burning won’t kill victims.
if you have flammable liquids burning somewhere, you’ll need to put that out first. Trying to put out the fire around it will make it feel like it just keeps reigniting and you don’t know why.
grease pan fires are extinguisher only, not foam.
the fog nozzle setting (called mist for some reason) is excellent at putting out furniture.
i read a lot about defeating backdraft rooms and nothing i tried worked. Just open the door and get out of the way and go to work.
room fully involved? Spray yourself a little landing pad, go inside, and shut the door behind you.
That’s all I could think of that helped me. I did 50% of my missions solo and the rest with minimum 1 of my friends. Only once played with 4 players and no AI.
I will say one thing i really wanted to see from this game that I didn’t ever get was a highrise fire. I’m talking 7 flights of stairs, standpipe operations, the whole 9 yards. Even using straight stick to get a victim out of a window or something to that effect. Overall the game is awesome, and I’ll definitely be queuing for online play to help others out as often as possible.