Balance issue - medicine cabinets

[General Failure]

Right now medicine cabinets are ridiculous.
Most of my important rooms have 50 or more for a nice diagnosis/treatment boost.
My suggestion is that bonuses should be either
1) capped at some value, e.g. 10% or
2) decreasing with every additional cabinet, preferably with slightly increased value for the first cabinet, perhaps something like 2%, 1.75%, 1.5% etc
On top of that, perhaps cabinets should need restocking by nurses.

[Keaton Fox]

I entirely agree! Some decoration/furnature items are too exploitable by spamming them. Along with Gold Stars, they're all to often spammed in mininum sized rooms and harboring maximum results. There's no incentive to build bigger rooms with a vareity of items when such overpowered spammable items can yield better results. Every guide I read to see says to never make rooms bigger than mininum size and to clutter every room with Medicine Cabinets and Gold Star Awards. It really removes a lot of the freedom from the game when you're at a disadvantage playing any other way.

I'd love to see Medicine Cabinets and Gold Stars wither capped in % or Prestige, or have diminishing effects after a certain ammount, or are late to end game unlocks with high price tags, or have higher restrictions in placement.

[Silence Suzuka]

Maybe you can have a look of this thread i made.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/535930/discussions/2/1742220359685957608/

[COVID-19]

Agreed. I’d prefer to see the first and maybe second instance of each item being more useful, but with hard diminishing returns.

[nizz1987]

yeah i totally agree, it would be nice to have other furniture and items that contribute to the efficiency of the room.

[druegan2001]

Honestly, I've experimented with them, and I don't really find them that useful. I've gotten my 45 total stars, "beat" the game as it were.. I did that on one level, cramming full of medicine cabinets.. aaand.. it didn't really massively improve things over just building normal offices. I'll put maybe 4 in a 3x3 GP's office, max.. and it doesn't really make a big difference even then.. Have had one map where I had over 200 in each office. It just made huge offices that were a pain in the ass, and there were still congestion issues.

Gold star spam... honestly, it's helpful if you're looking to keep a build as tight as possible.. but other than that, it's not really needed. What we could use is actually a wider variety of items to boost room prestige, because the size thing is also sort of nonsensical when it comes to it..

Like, I don't know of any doctor's office that I've ever been in that was this great big open space room.. they're usually big enough for a desk with computer, an examination table, a counter with sink, and a couple chairs..

A really nicely appointed one has some good quality furniture, maybe a plant, some nice walls.. but they're all fairly similar, really

[mreed2]

Gold Star Certificate spam (or similar) doesn't make the game easier -- it, at the very least, doesn't make the game harder. In the vast majority of cases, it makes the game much harder.

Medicne cabinet spam (or similar) does make the game faster (you can get to 3 stars in less real world time with medicne cabinet spam than without). However, it doesn't make the game easier, as it trades one problem (patients having to visit multiple diagnosis rooms prior to treatment) for another (patients have to walk further because GP offices are enormous).

And, of course, neither of these is required to 3 star all levels.

But, as the OP observed, some people can't see an "exploitable" feature without, well, exploiting it -- even if it is manifestly obviously that it makes the game less fun. I really don't understand this behvaior, but its apparently a thing now.

[Montiness]

that seems more like you're sacrificing the overall effectiveness of your hospital for one room. It's not an "overpowered" item. If you're placing that much emphasis on it you are not going to be able to accomodate larger numbers of clients, or a terribly wide range of illnesses.

There's no need to "nerf" it.

You want other items that contribute? There are many. If ANYTHING in the game is "OP" then it's the gold star award.

[OldGamer]

Originally posted by druegan2001:

Honestly, I've experimented with them, and I don't really find them that useful. I've gotten my 45 total stars, "beat" the game as it were.. I did that on one level, cramming full of medicine cabinets.. aaand.. it didn't really massively improve things over just building normal offices. I'll put maybe 4 in a 3x3 GP's office, max.. and it doesn't really make a big difference even then.. Have had one map where I had over 200 in each office. It just made huge offices that were a pain in the ass, and there were still congestion issues.

You can make it that only the GP can diagnose a patient with one hit, this makes space as you simply delete your diagnosis rooms and just have your treatment rooms.

However, as you say, it's time consuming to make and it doesn't look good. So I now just do training+GP offices with Cardio+Fluid and sometimes scanners if needed for diag. Usually gets them in two hits so it's not much of a big jump from one hitting them with a huge GP office with loads of MCs in them.

[druegan2001]

Originally posted by OldGamer:

Originally posted by druegan2001:

Honestly, I've experimented with them, and I don't really find them that useful. I've gotten my 45 total stars, "beat" the game as it were.. I did that on one level, cramming full of medicine cabinets.. aaand.. it didn't really massively improve things over just building normal offices. I'll put maybe 4 in a 3x3 GP's office, max.. and it doesn't really make a big difference even then.. Have had one map where I had over 200 in each office. It just made huge offices that were a pain in the ass, and there were still congestion issues.

You can make it that only the GP can diagnose a patient with one hit, this makes space as you simply delete your diagnosis rooms and just have your treatment rooms.

However, as you say, it's time consuming to make and it doesn't look good. So I now just do training+GP offices with Cardio+Fluid and sometimes scanners if needed for diag. Usually gets them in two hits so it's not much of a big jump from one hitting them with a huge GP office with loads of MCs in them.

I've heard you can do this.. and probably can most of the time, but I've had misses even with GP5 and 200 cabinets. But really, what I've found to be far more effective is just to spread out the GP's offices, and you don't need entire buildings devoted to medicine cabinets that way..

Because you can't set GP's offices to "intake" or "followup", or multipurpose rooms to either "diagnosis" or "treatment" only.. you can't really set up a sane kind of patient flow with any reliability.. (also because AI pathing is really screwy yet..)

But the most successful hospitals I've had, in terms of being able to handle heavy patient flow, is to have a set of GP's right near Reception, then a bunch of diagnosis stuff farther out, with more GP's offices right next to those, and then the treatment rooms farthest away as a "last stop"..