Suggestion: hospital reputation and crowded GP

[13 kg of persimon]

Intro:
Patient's zerg rush is one of the most annoying things right now. You just don't have enough resources to handle the patients' income, GP offices are terribly queued. You build a pretty facility but at once it turns into a crowded pit (buying and staffing more building helps, but does not solve problem)

Reputation:
patient income depends on hospital reputation, and this value quickly grows up to 90%+ and doesnt go bellow, whatever you do. Bad treatment, patients die here and there, "patients sleeping in their sick" - no matter hospital remains crystal reputation.
Manually kicking off patients from hospital helps.., but that's not how it should be, right?

Expected:
balance reputation increase and decrease factors.
The player should be motivated to get more patients, not to get rid of them.

[Rucyn]

Was going to make a post about this. There seems to be no noticable penalty for deaths, long waits, failed treatments or anything that should have some affect on reputation. The only reputation that seems to do anything is prices.

If you have a high cure rate in the beginning of a map the number of patients increases too fast. One map I didn't even get the 1 star rating before I had to have 6 GP offices handling the flood of patients.

[Inny【🐭】Nazrin]

You don't understand the reputation mechanic. It is not locked in place.

Increase your prices dramatically and your reputation will fall sharply, reducing the influx of new patients.

[Silence Suzuka]

I'm only on level 3 and i had to build 6 GP office to handle all the patients.

My suggestion is to improve the game logic. Patients go to all the diagnose room that helps (or they reach 100% diagnosed) and then come back to GP office. For now it seems the patients go to one diagnose room and then go back to GP and then next diagnose. That is why GP office is badly queued. It is like you need 1 GP office for every 2 or 3 diagnose room you have.

[[LCND] Mantalow]

we should be able to customize reception desks and tell employees not to let enter patients when GP offices > some value. I mean, in a real hospital, you can't have any appointment right now if all the doctors are all busy.

[Knightframe]

Originally posted by A-TeamIceRain:

I'm only on level 3 and i had to build 6 GP office to handle all the patients.

My suggestion is to improve the game logic. Patients go to all the diagnose room that helps (or they reach 100% diagnosed) and then come back to GP office. For now it seems the patients go to one diagnose room and then go back to GP and then next diagnose. That is why GP office is badly queued. It is like you need 1 GP office for every 2 or 3 diagnose room you have.

I check patients that have a high enogh diagnose and send them to threatment. It frees a gp slot.
There is no reason for them to go back there anyway.

[13 kg of persimon]

Originally posted by Knightframe:

Originally posted by A-TeamIceRain:

I'm only on level 3 and i had to build 6 GP office to handle all the patients.

My suggestion is to improve the game logic. Patients go to all the diagnose room that helps (or they reach 100% diagnosed) and then come back to GP office. For now it seems the patients go to one diagnose room and then go back to GP and then next diagnose. That is why GP office is badly queued. It is like you need 1 GP office for every 2 or 3 diagnose room you have.

I check patients that have a high enogh diagnose and send them to threatment. It frees a gp slot.
There is no reason for them to go back there anyway.

I realy hope that necessity of gp second visit will be removed or automated.
at higher levels this game turns into fkn turn based strategy - 5 minutes on pause managing staff patients and rooms, 1 minute of normal speed and than pause again.
personel and patient's AI irritates so hard. why are they so stooopeeeed&!

[Eriktion]

Did the devs play-test this game at all?

Just do the first 3-4 levels with 3 stars and you just cant overlook those problems

[Tizferatu]

Originally posted by Eriktion:

Did the devs play-test this game at all?

Just do the first 3-4 levels with 3 stars and you just cant overlook those problems

It's not a problem. It's the primary challenge of the game - finding and eliminating bottlenecks. As is the case in just about every management sim.

It's not all that difficult to "kill the queues". Just need to adjust the layout and have well trained, specialized staff.

If you can't do that for whatever reason, then you need to brute force a lot more GPs (an alternate way to eliminate the bottleneck, but obviously less effecient).

That said, there are a few bugs that excacerbate things a bit that do need to get taken care of (pathfinding, people in the 1 - 3 slots taking off to take care of needs, etc...).

[13 kg of persimon]

Originally posted by tizuby:

Originally posted by Eriktion:

Did the devs play-test this game at all?

Just do the first 3-4 levels with 3 stars and you just cant overlook those problems

It's not a problem. It's the primary challenge of the game - finding and eliminating bottlenecks. As is the case in just about every management sim.

game that challanges player to do the routine micromanagement over and over again instead of planning and strategy is definitely a bad game.

putting staff to right place, patient monitoring and queue management, cloning rooms manually is not fun, it starts to be annoying very fast.

Same problem was in recent Surviving Mars, stupid personnel AI management is unbearable as your colony/hospital grows big enough

[ScruffyBamboo]

The queues length is a direct result of your staff's inability to properly diagnose illnesses.

I'm currently on level 8, and my 4 GP offices are more than enough to handle the volume - no more than 1 or 2 in each queue. The thing is - my doctors are specialists. The GP docs ONLY work in GP, and they're trained that way (most are up to GP IV now).

But that's just half the picture - you also need good diagnostic nurses! The idea is that the patient will bounce from a GP to a different diagnostic room and back to a GP until they hit 100% diagnosis. If your untrained staff are allowed to diagnose, they will only be moving the diagnosis forward by a very small amount (around 10% it seems) each time - it takes a ton of trips to the GP, thus creating huge lines.

So again, the solution is employee specialization and training.

[Tizferatu]

Originally posted by 13:

Originally posted by tizuby:

It's not a problem. It's the primary challenge of the game - finding and eliminating bottlenecks. As is the case in just about every management sim.

game that challanges player to do the routine micromanagement over and over again instead of planning and strategy is definitely a bad game.

putting staff to right place, patient monitoring and queue management, cloning rooms manually is not fun, it starts to be annoying very fast.

Same problem was in recent Surviving Mars, stupid personnel AI management is unbearable as your colony/hospital grows big enough

You don't really need to micro anything other than training and research. That's all it takes to clear the queue.

Get your GPs trained up, get your diagnostic staff trained up, get the machines upgraded, queue problem solved.

It's intended to function that way because they said as much during their livestream this morning.

The room copy thing is an issue they're aware of. There's a function in game to do it, but it wasn't able to be finished up before release, and right now they have a lot of higher priority issues to work on.

But yeah, if you don't like management sim games (and this one probably has the least amount of micro) this genre probably isn't for you.

[Tizferatu]

Originally posted by ScruffyBamboo:

The queues length is a direct result of your staff's inability to properly diagnose illnesses.

I'm currently on level 8, and my 4 GP offices are more than enough to handle the volume - no more than 1 or 2 in each queue. The thing is - my doctors are specialists. The GP docs ONLY work in GP, and they're trained that way (most are up to GP IV now).

But that's just half the picture - you also need good diagnostic nurses! The idea is that the patient will bounce from a GP to a different diagnostic room and back to a GP until they hit 100% diagnosis. If your untrained staff are allowed to diagnose, they will only be moving the diagnosis forward by a very small amount (around 10% it seems) each time - it takes a ton of trips to the GP, thus creating huge lines.

So again, the solution is employee specialization and training.

Exactly this.

Also don't forget to upgrade diagnostic machines. That plays a significant part as well.

[Knightframe]

Originally posted by 13:

Originally posted by Knightframe:

I check patients that have a high enogh diagnose and send them to threatment. It frees a gp slot.
There is no reason for them to go back there anyway.

I realy hope that necessity of gp second visit will be removed or automated.
at higher levels this game turns into fkn turn based strategy - 5 minutes on pause managing staff patients and rooms, 1 minute of normal speed and than pause again.
personel and patient's AI irritates so hard. why are they so stooopeeeed&!

Its not --- click patient button (and be sure you pause the game):
-- Check everyone that is on GP --) Button send to threatment
2 things will happen:
- npc will go to threatment instantly skipping GP
- npc cannot be healed due to lack or room --) send this loser home

Button wont be visiable if diagnosis lvl is to low.

[Evilsod]

The game says it ties 2 things to Reputation. Patient numbers and Staff 'quality'. But these are also tied to the Hospital Level which seems to escalate the patient numbers significantly more than Reputation does. Staff 'quality' just seems completely random.

I've just finished Smogley in a 4 years 10 months. My reputation has been at ~100% since years ago. My hospital level has steadily increased to 21 and I'm currently at around 150 patients and it seems to be holding steady for now.

If I were to increase my prices now to the point that my reputation started to decrease, has anyone tried to find out how it effects patient numbers? Would it be a linear drop so at 50% rep I would see 50% of the patient numbers? Would it be a curve so at 20% reputation I still see 80% patients but with a sharp decrease to 0% (or vice versa, a rapid decrease down to 80% reputation then it stabilises at a low number).

I'm just wondering if you are actually meant to be playing with the price slider in order to influence your reputation and make it balance out at a lower point until you can handle it.