Roquefort Castle tips?

[Helen A]

Any tips for this hospital?
I was cruising towards three stars, having achieved the 600 cure patient target, hitting the cure rate mostly, and was just 8% off staff Morale being at the required 90%, I had 3.5k value and was earning money every time, then all of a sudden it stopped and i started losing ... 90/100k each time, despite all machines being fully up to date, happy staff, no queues, etc ...
I dont know why I all of a sudden started to lose money as nothing had changed ...
any tips? so frustrated as this is 3/4th time getting close, but this was the closest I got and now about to go bust and have to start over AGAIN and I'm frustrated as was sooooo close, lol!
thanks!

[Renzor]

My giant hospitals, as staff gets promoted, gets more and more expensive to run.

And then out of nowhere, patients will start getting stuck with the whole diagnosis rooms thing. I'll have 3/4 of my varied diagnosis rooms empty, but for whatever stupid reason everyone is queuing for general diagnosis or some lower tier diagnosis room.

Anyways, what I've resorted to doing is having 1-2 marketing rooms and always doing pharmacy campaigns. I end up having like 12 pharmacies being money makers throughout the year. It's the only way to afford large hospitals without it inevitably crashing.

I dont really think the game was intended to be played this way, but it's the only way I've been able to get 3 stars on almost all the maps. I only have 2 maps left (not counting the dlc) to get 3 stars.

[Renzor]

I also raise the prices on everything like crazy too, and lower diagnosis threshold to 75%. For some reason my reputation always stays permanently GREAT regardless what I do it seems.

[Helen A]

If I raise prices people just dont pay!?

Will try thr phamacy and marketing route thanks - i never have problems making money until i get almost close to the three star point then lose it all - happened on a few hospitals. I have about 3 left that i have 2 stars on but need to get the third one as well as Roqfort.

[Kattsylt]

I did the marketing thingy aswell. But with de-humorizer instead of pharmacy so i could get the career goal finished =P.
But yeah, the game is a bit random aswell. The stream of patients can fluctuate quite drastically for seemingly no reason at all.
I've managed to get all stars now on both base game and dlc, the best tactic for most of them is to just brute force the objectives. No finess and fancy layouts

[Freiya]

You can safely increase prices to +30% (except for GP, I recommend to leave it at 0%). People not paying should be quite rare at +30% especially if you have no queue/unhappiness issues. Even if some of them don't pay, the higher prices will more than compensate the loss.

It's hard to say what your problem is exactly but money you lose monthly comes from wages (and loans). So maybe too many employees were promoted to level 4 or 5 which could explain why you lose lose money since their salaries increased ? Maybe you have too many employees too.

[milkygirl]

Just a couple of other hints:

The higher rank a member of staff is when you hire them, the higher their yearly pay is. When you hire a 5-rank from the hire list, you might notice they charge around 55K per year. If you instead raise a student (no rank), their 5-rank pay is between 35K and 40K. So it's best to hire staff with as few qualifications as possible, at least until you have millions in the bank. The threshold I usually use while the hospital is growing is 3-rank. 4-rank and 5-rank tend to tank my hospitals.

You can also get steady money through research. There is both the regular Research for 20K money, and the DLC has a 35K Research. A full team of five 5-rank researchers (raised from lower ranks) per room can give you 2-3 completions per month. Haven't tested to see if I can have both going at the same time, but am planning on trying it my next Swelbard run.

[sharn]

I always increase price by 100% once I hit like 1million cash. And I then manage to get 20 million cash after a few years, doing absolutely anything: once the hospital is set up, nothing needs to be really done except increasing salaries, grouping diagnosis, etc.
I've jut finished level 9 (public hospital) and my TPH foundation value is 90 million.

[miau]

I found this tricky too! I played through twice and In the end I beat it by focusing on staff morale by training everyone in emotional intelligence (own trainers), and fast-tracking patients through treatment. By doing that and not building anything else my profits went up, and your "profit" value is directly related to the number of months you've been in profit in the last 12 months. So if you have a bad month or two it can really impact your value if you've had a good run for a while before that. It was annoyingly slow in the last stages. I sold my marketing room towards the end and got rid of the extra assistants and did some cash research just to keep the profit line up.

[Helen A]

Thanks everyone
Some good tips and ideas
i tend to train all my staff to as high as I can get them in specific fields so often have 4/5 shrinks with 5 star trainings etc so maybe thats one of the issues as by the time i get to working towards the third star theyre all being paid highly?
I'll try not doing that this time, but whats the most effective way to have trained staff? If say I have 5 pysch rooms how many would you train to a high level etc?

I havnt done the research thing at all for money so i'll look into that too.

Ive got one or two other hospitals in the main game I also need to get a third star for and struggle with and again usually the money thing so maybe my training tactic etc is at fault.

I'll give all your suggestions above a go - thanks everyone x

[Freiya]

Having all your staff at level 5 shouldn't be an issue by itself except if they are overpaid (more than 45k for level 5 doctors for example), or if you employ too many people.

However, if you don't find what else can be improved in your hospital, I would say it's usually better to have high level staff taking care of diagnosis. If you don't have an objective asking you to have something like 90% cure rate, you can probably keep employees taking care of treatments at level 3 only. Same for janitors and assistants, you can be fine with level 2 or 3 staff only.

Not sure if it was just an hypothesis but do you have 5 psy rooms ? If yes, I would first see if having 5 of these rooms is really necessary. They are great for treatments but I would not use more than 2 psy room for diagnosis. They are cheap to build but only give 1 000$ per diagnosis by default, so in the end they are very costly. I only had 2 psy rooms during the castle mission and even manually deactivated "diagnosis" for those rooms when I was seeing a queue forming up to let them focus on treatment for a while.

Regarding the research to money system, level 3 with Research III skill is all you need for your researchers to be the most "profitable". 5 of them working in the room is definitely optimal to speed-up the projects. However, it will take time for the initial costs to set up the system to be "repaid" and to really become profitable.

If you want more details, look at the section "Money research project analysis" I added lately in this guide. There might be some info that might interest you too in the section "Tips to prevent bankruptcy".
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1519429114