Haha, well not quite. I’ve got the big one in the middle, one hospital left. I dare not pick up Kingmaker until I finish some of my other games! I do try to finish almost every game I buy… except Skyrim. Left time i launched that I couldn’t even remember what the main quest was, and I hate the inventory system.
Is there a penalty for firing people? Like do the rest of the staff get upset?
There is. It’s not morale but hospital level. If you have really skilled staff that you fire or quit, you can drop your hospital level which can be a challenge for some of the hospitals. It’s a little unclear that this is happening though because I don’t think it actually shows until they’re off the map, not when you click the button.
I should add, that usually way into the game, like towards the end of the star. At the beginning sometimes I hire staff to train others or get by and fire them later. So early on it’s not much of a penalty. You just don’t want to fire your fully skilled staff member if you are trying to hit one of those harder hospital levels.
I’m only on hospital 3 so I’m still doing a lot of learning. Can I ask a few more questions?
- Should I be increasing the price of all my stuff a bit?
- Does salary happiness of the employees affect how well they can cure people?
Of course. I’ll just say I am not a expert. I find a number of the 3 stars challenging and one hospital I found not fun to play at all but… overall I like and am near completion.
I felt no need to mess with prices for most the game. I think there is a strategy out there for this, especially to get more feet in the doors because you can mark the cheap stuff down and mark the expensive stuff up, but sometimes they refused to pay even a mild increase like 10%. Suddenly my 20k surgery netted zero dollars; I did not like that. 3 in you might not have it yet, but I use marketing to guide foot traffic more, and I might have dropped some of the low level diagnoses to get more traffic on only a few hospitals. If you’re interested in that approach though I do think there are people out there that wrote about how to do it.
I am not 100% on the morale thing. Unhappy staff are slow and walk like their feet turned to cement, so I frequently keep them at normal, actively. The only time I really reached for high morale though is in later hospitals that require that for the stars, and that requirement can be really high. Demoralized staff are expensive and require immediate fixes, so I tried to avoid that. I want to say I don’t think my staff members who pranced around the halls were more efficient because they were so happy. I think that has more to do with their skill level and skills and the room bonuses.
Excellent thanks. So I should maybe do raises that get the semi smiling face then? It’s kinda the intermediate one.
I didn’t mess with hospital prices until my 5th or 6th hospital.
I need to get back to this, argh so much to play… and I have like 5 hours of free time a week. D:
I try to keep them yellow which I guess is meh. I mostly didn’t care until the at moral requirements was in a lot of hospitals. There is a way to look at all your staff at once too. you can pause the game, give all those unhappy, ungrateful bastards a small raise and get them into the yellow again.
The one thing to keep in mind though is a couple of hospitals are really profit centric… so I kept floating the staff at the bottom and letting them drop on that one.
It’s good to experiment a bit early on though because right now you can toy with it, so later when it becomes a requirement, you kind of know what works and what you like. Like if staff morale is the top concern and money isn’t, at least not beyond keeping the hospital open and running, what would you change differently.
I think the best thing they did with this game is give you the option to choose your difficulty. If you only want to do the one star, you can still open everything. 2 star I would say is kind of normal and some of the three stars are… hard. I did reset a few hospitals because I lost control… on the three star. I only got frustrated, as in not fun, with one hospital. “Winning” that hospital gave me no satisfaction either.
Can you change everyone’s salaries at once? Or a few at a time?
Yes. You open the the staff window and hit the $ button.
I usually sort by happiness because the ones that are usually unhappy are also the ones that have a lower salary than they want. You just drag that little bar over and it tells you the percentage and dollar amount increase as well as their new smiley level. You can also mouse over the happiness bar and get their happiness level too. This is more important later when you’re trying target the higher requirements.
Is there some way to modify a group of them at once (outside of the satisfy pay request which only seems to work for severely underpaid people)?
Same area. You can sort by the options at the top. you can also sort by occupation. And anything you change will have a green check mark next to it. It’s not done until you confirm it. So if i am doing a lot at once I usually pause the game, sort by occupation, look at the doctors, nurses or whatever, change like five of them and then hit the check mark button.
Is that what mean?
This area of the menu is also where you would go to mass send patients home or force them to treatment.
I meant like if I dragged the bar everyone’s salary would go up at once so I don’t have to drag the little bar to give them a raise for like 20 people in a row (just to help my carpal tunnel).
I think I found something cool! Apparently you can add people to a ward? So if I made a super huge ward I could have multiple nurses work there to keep things moving along quicker? Do I have that right?
Ohhh also. If I don’t give my people training, can they keep saving up, so much later they’ll have 2 training slots available?
Oh. I don’t think there is a way to do that, and I don’t think you’d want to. Most of your staff are going to come up for promotion. If you give them a little extra it might last them until the next promotion. For the most part though you wouldn’t want to. The janitors seem to go down a lot because they’re running outside and whinning about their weather, also their wages are really cheap. Then there are those that have a happiness trait, no reason to give those happy go lucky folks raises!
Yes, you have it right, there are actually, I wanna say four rooms you can do that with although the ward is the only one you start with. The general rule of thumb is if you can add another desk, you can add more staff. I don’t typically do this very often unless it stays very busy or… if you are handling an emergency.
They get open slots based on their experience. I can rarely keep up with everyone wanting training, plus I can’t afford to have everyone in classrooms when is money is to be made! So in general you can train at your own leisure or, more precisely, focus on what is needed. The slots don’t go away. It wasn’t until almost the last hospital that I ever felt I was waiting for a slot to open. Training is another way to make them happy, so the text says. I find they just as for a promotion as soon as they are done training.
I will say I love training. I take cheap labor and train the heck out of it rather than the most experience person offered unless… I need that skill. Then I might have a couple of highly trained staff training everyone for 2/3, 3/4th the game.
I like the training aspect too :)
It’s so much fun. That little naturally happy work for peanuts doctor is going to be one of my first and most skilled staff member, pair him up with the naturally motivated nurse with healing hands… that could be my surgery team right there!
IMO raise prices 20% across the board when you start the map. Keep treatment prices high, and general practice low.
Prices affect reputation. If you find your reputation is not going up as you like, decrease cost on the cheaper procedures like general visits. Make all your money on the treatment.
Each patient is going to have say, 2 GP visits, 2 Diagnosistic tests, and 1 treatment. If you look at the prices you’ll see most of the money is in the treatment.
I further suspect the reputation cost is PER procedure, and not per dollar. That is, a -10% GP visit offsets a +10% treatment.
Is there a way to slow down the number of patients coming in once things get a bit out of control?
Raising prices actually indirectly helps with that, I believe reputation affects rate of incoming patients.
Oh excellent. I’ve been sending people home manually and those about to die LOL.