I found the way I play kept my staff average at around 60-70 with giving regular raises and slowly giving the rooms a higher prestige. When I looked at my staff list and their general happiness, it was easy to see I had a lot of high 100 morale and some pretty lows. when I completed all other requirements for a star, I focused on the morale one and sent tired, hungry, thirsty and bathroom needy staff on breaks, gave the ones complaining about salaries raises and made sure the vending machines and bathrooms were easily acceptable as well as sometimes moving staff rooms closer and putting drinks and food there. For really really high morale scenarios, it seemed to be all about salary to get over those humps… like over pay green smiley kind of salary.
That seems similar to what I did, but I probably ignored prestige for longer than I should have. Earlier on my average was a bit higher, but as I went along it started to dip as people wanted training - I didn’t stay on top of it. Then I moved to manual breaks and giving them green smiley salary happiness. I also hired more people so I had a cushion and people seemed to take more breaks on their own Oh yeah, I also built a 3rd bathroom since I noticed my 2 were pretty busy.
Just starting mission 6 I think - the one that introduces marketing. I started paying attention to my patients a little more. A recent one went from GP -> General Diagnosis -> GP->Cardiology->GP
If the general practitioner was better at diagnosis, would they possibly have cut out a step (or two)? Do they only need to go through that entire chain if the employees aren’t good enough at diagnosing? I imagine some things are harder to diagnose too?
So far, and I don’t mean this as a negative, the missions have required reacting in what I feel a fairly predictable way. If there are too many patients outside the GPs office, then build another GP. I think with research and training it will open up more opportunities for variance from an obvious plan - but I’m not sure yet.
After having success in the prior missions I got too careless with money and am struggling to stay profitable in my current one. It’s funny that it is in a rich town! I raised the prices 10% and quite a few people refuse to pay. My reputation is near 100%. Are there any tools in the game to help decide if a price increase leads to higher profits? I saw a general income / expenses graph but I don’t think that is good enough to answer the question.
Edit: it would also be nice to see the profit / loss by room and by service type (i.e. fracture clinic)
Max out GP and it’s one stop to treatment.
If you want an easy hint/tip:
Right when you start the scenario, turn up all the prices 50%. As you bring in more stuff, make sure to go back to that tab and move the prices up there as well. This helps both your bottom line and cut down the number of people who overwhelm your services. If you find too many people not paying, the drop all of them by 10% and repeat as necessary.
Good, that’s what it seemed like. I started doing that in my current scenario - the one by the power plants. I focused on training my GPs, and then my nurses who do diagnostics. It seemed to be helping.
It’s funny, towards the beginning and middle of a scenario I’m all organized, assigning people to duties, training them in a logical manner. Then I hit a point where so many patients are pouring in and I start to get sloppy. Then I have to clean up the mess that I made.
Something I found to help my sanity: make sure you have a nest egg then delete the reception desks until your GP’s are all caught up.
Is it a sign that I’ve been playing this too much since on the bus ride to go hiking the music from this kept playing over and over in my head?
It means you have played just enough. heh.
I think they should have given the player the ability to attach diagnose / treatment flags on the drs instead of the room, or maybe prioritize which drs go where. Otherwise drs that are good at one can be sent to a room that is meant for the other.
You can tell the doctors which rooms they are allowed to work in, well more like which type of room.
I do that. My problem is that a psychiatrist diagnoses and cures. Sometimes I hire one that already has some skills like psychiatrist and treatment. Ideally I’d like to put him in a room that just does treatment, but I don’t think the game looks at the drs skill to decide which room he will go to. Ideally the psychiatrists just get trained in psychiatry, but it doesn’t always work out that way.
I was in dire straits financially in my current scenario, but barely got it turned around. I think the game doesn’t really want the player to fail as it seemed to just feed me the right number of patients to recover when my reputation tanked.
The only trouble I remember having with straight up cash as a problem was Duckworth, that whole hospital was like it took the game concepts and turned it upside down to give you a faux challenge by basically not complying with what the game teaches you.
I didn’t do any sort of pricing or receptionist tricks. Sometimes I did send a bunch of people home though to help rearrange things, let the staff catch-up. This doesn’t help with money but getting things efficient sure does. Are you at marketing yet?
Yep, I have marketing. I’ve used it to bring in surgeries, repair my reputation, etc…
I forgot the name of the scenario, but its the one that says it is a teaching hospital that emphasizes surgery.
I’m getting so many customers that it’s hard to meet my final condition of a 90% cure rate. I jacked up the prices and people are still pouring in. I’m trying to make sure people are trained up to the max too.
So for some of the scenarios. I cleared out my almost dead people, like 50+ of them. I did this in the original game too. It destroys your cure rate for a little while but now you have people who should be able to survive to treatment instead of the ones that will go into your GP office, leave and drop dead on their way to the next room.
I did that in a prior scenario but didn’t here. Right before my cure rate tanked, I had all the 3 star criteria except my cure rate was 80 and i needed 90. Then I just got overrun with people and my GPs got swamped. I should have tried weeding people out, but I was ready to be done with it and just let it run. My cure rate dropped to about 40.
My reputation must have been through the roof because even after letting it run for a long time my reputation bar stayed full. So the people just kept coming. If my reputation dropped at least they probably wouldn’t have kept coming so quickly.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll try weeding out the unhealthy patients and see if that does the trick. Otherwise I’ll just settle for 2 stars I guess.
Based on what others did here, I can see they did more tricks then I did. I did do the kick out the those dying patients trick, which again was a common thing to do in the old game and why it’s there, and other than that I think one of my hospitals had somewhere around 11 GP offices. I wound up with all these little satellite buildings with a couple of GP offices, and 2-3 diagnoses rooms. They just got really big. I should sign into see the hospital values are in comparison to everyone else’s. I felt like a couple just sort of dragged on but i got it!
Only one hospital really felt not fun to me, and if you haven’t done that one yet, well hopefully you enjoy more than I did.
FYI: The specialist skills are better than the generic treatment or diagnosis skills. So Pysch 1 + 2 is better than Psych 1 + Diagnosis or Psych 1 + Treatment.
Also, as for your overflowing issues: Open the patients list and sort by status, putting the “reception” symbol at the top of your list. Watch it for a bit and as soon as a new person joins that list click on them and watch them get out of their car and walk into your hospital etc. Follow them through and hopefully you should see why there’s such a slow-down and what all of the stuff they walk into on the way is.
It’s probably in your reception / GP area. e.g. Maybe the corridors need to be 3 or 4 wide instead of 1 or 2? Or maybe you need more “stuff” for them whilst their waiting in the queue, and fewer chairs?
OK, I got things under control and got the 3 stars for the mission. Thanks for the suggestions @Nesrie and @Pod. I had to do massive kicking out of patients. I had to do a couple of passes going through the list and kicking out people with low happiness or health. Luckily I had saved up around 2 million dollars so I could absorb losses for a while.
I think there are a couple lessons I can take away from this.
1- Don’t wait so long to use price to try and reduce the flow of new patients into the hospital.
2- Try to do a better job of selling off rooms as I expand to keep other diagnostic services grouped with the GPs.
3- Start training sooner. I tend to wait for a while.
4- Pay more attention to where I have some walkway bottlenecks. Like @Pod mentioned there were a couple places that could have used a wider hallway.
I think I may have just hit it. Is it the one where you don’t earn money from curing / diagnosis, etc? I was OK with it until the goal was unclog 8 toilets. It’s going to take forever to get enough activity in there to get 8 clogs. I wonder if I need to start an ad campaign to raise my rep to get more traffic.
I had to abandon my first attempt but got 1 star on my second. I guess I’ll see how far I can take it.