GP Queue Needs Tweaking - it's not just us.

[The Abecedarian]

Regardless of how amazing you are at this game, and regardless of how much you're able to plan out, I maintain that the queuing system needs a few tweaks. Here's the issue:

GP offices need to be visited most frequently. That's great. I build a heck ton of them every level - at least as many as every other room type combined. The doctors who staff them are trained specifically through the GP and Diagnosis tracks, and are restricted to work there exclusively. The issue is that even under those optimal conditions, ANY other amenity in the hospital can create a bottleneck that costs my patients their lives and my shareholders their profit.

Right now, the priority of waiting for the hand-dryer is the same as SAVING YOUR LIFE. True story - I added a cafe to a thriving hospital, and the resulting congestion sent the hospital on the path to inescapable bankrupcy even after I deleted it. It's a vicious cycle: patient waiting on patient waiting on patient waiting on patient waiting on patient waiting on patient waiting on patient waiting on patient waiting on patient waiting on patient waiting on GENERAL PRACTITIONER waiting on patient waiting on NEWSTAND?!

As the late game plays right now, it's safest to delete anything non life-saving, because even though our patients will be bored out of their minds, at least they'll have a chance of getting treatment. Any distraction will pull people away from their queue; and when queues are GOD, that means DEATH.

Possible Solutions, Community?

[snuggleform]

My caution would be: be careful what you wish for. Managing GP queues is one of the few puzzles in the game that keeps it entertaining. If it were like the treatment rooms, or even like the other diagnostic rooms, where you just slap down more to solve longer queues, I honestly think the game risks being far too easy.

[The Abecedarian]

I see your point, wsc150: However, IMHO the GP deadlock is not challenging - it's limiting. I've tried a dozen different configurations of hospitals, and because of the rigidity of the queuing system, the only reliable remedy I've found is to reduce distraction for my patients, so I can be SURE that they are outside their GP room when their turn is up.

I would prefer to be able to have access to those amenities without worrying about the inexorable bottlenecks that they will provide. Even a trip to the vending machine might take 40 or 50 days if the AI prioritizes that machine more, regardless of how many identical machines are within spitting distance.

[Avs]

Even after you've figured out the GP issue (by over compensating for the game design), you still run into the dreaded "hand drying takes days on end to resolve due to bad AI".

There's a reason why there's over 100 threads complaining about the GP issue, and less than 5 asking for more difficulty.

[Keep On Truckin]

I did some experimenting yesterday and today and found a bottleneck caused by psychiatry. It seems that even with other diagnosis options the psychiatrist gets some sort of priority regardless of queue size or proximity of other rooms. My workaround at the minute is not building one and turning patients away. I even added one to my massive hospital with a whole range of diagnosis and patients still went there for diagnosis joining the queue with the patients for treatment.

[Jeruzalem]

Can you not use imho? The honest part is losing value. Just in between.

[twopointjo]

There isn't much more important than having dry hands! :)

...we are looking in to GP queues and thinking hard about it. GP's are an integral part of the game so anything that tweak, we need to be very sure that it's the right thing to do. There are some bugs to do with patients always being very efficient or not doing what they are supposed to, which we are looking at now.

I'll also mention that the patient in the front of the queue hasn't been called in yet (so - if someone is 1 in the queue, that means someone else has just been called in, and they will be called in next)

More soon!

[Keep On Truckin]

I had my doubts too on the earlier levels but it's certainly an issue late game when you have over 100 patients. This doesn't make the later levels more difficult, just more time consuming. The game could be made more difficult in other ways such as making patient deaths punishing to reputation in some way, just to give one example. I'm sure people spamming 100 medicine cabinets in each GP's office wasn't what the devs intended. I don't myself, but I understand why others do.

[Keep On Truckin]

Dev rersponse while I was replying, cool :-). May I ask if I'm on the right track with the psychiatrist line of thought? I'm in work later on but I'm off on Tuesday so I'll have another play around with the diagnosis. I'm interested how the GP decides where to send the patient on their first consultation and also how they decide after some diagnosis has been performed. Proximity to rooms definitely isn't a factor, that's about all I've managed to ascertain at the moment. I've followed several patients round the hospital from reception onwards if you were wondering about my methology.

[Avs]

You could always have post diagnose patients queue to the front instead of wait behind a bunch of new comers.

You could have it so you can assign thresholds for diagnose so only post diagnose patients go to specific GP offices.

You could have specific doctors work specific GP offices meant to send them to treatment.

You could have a new post diagnose room that does this with the same doc setup.

Heck not having docs stand up and walk around or having patients actually queue outside the door in larger hospitals helps. And patients who are called in, but need to "sit down" on a bench in front of the room, then get back up and actually go in, would all help allivate issues Ive seen.

Or having a two point objective system so the patient always prioritizes efficiently getting food/drink/toilet and ends up back at their queue destination rather than bouncing back and forth between the room and each of their desires.

[Xuhybrid]

Originally posted by wsc150:

My caution would be: be careful what you wish for. Managing GP queues is one of the few puzzles in the game that keeps it entertaining. If it were like the treatment rooms, or even like the other diagnostic rooms, where you just slap down more to solve longer queues, I honestly think the game risks being far too easy.

Alright, well give us a way to limit the incoming patients. Pretty sure TH never had this many people flooding in.

[Keep On Truckin]

If I recall correctly you could set a maximum queue amount if you had multiple rooms of the same type. This was especially useful for splitting the patients up for emergencies. This forced the other rooms to be used. Oh and patients walked through each other in TH, ghost or not ;-p

[Dan]

The AI in this game is a mess. Handdryers will kill people.

[Davamix]

To mitigate the long queues I check the patient list from time to time and I send for treatment to all of them who has the diagnosis at 100%

[Talon Rose]

Originally posted by wsc150:

My caution would be: be careful what you wish for. Managing GP queues is one of the few puzzles in the game that keeps it entertaining. If it were like the treatment rooms, or even like the other diagnostic rooms, where you just slap down more to solve longer queues, I honestly think the game risks being far too easy.

No.
To literally every single thing you have said here.
It's not fun to have massive queues. It's not a puzzle, either. It's an *issue*.
Just like how if I have a working hospital but if I'm nagged into getting a DNA room for Denim Jeans built and I do it, *everyone* goes over there to diagnose themselves instead of the better and fully upgraded TWO Fluid Analysis machines. That is not my fault, after all.

[Sgt_Serge]

One way to solve it would be that patients with a Queue number of 1 don't go anywhere and if they become Nr. 1 they stop what they're doing and go to the door. Would also be a potential difficulty level: easy: No 3 or less stop what they're doing, normal 1 or less, hard - same as today