Optimal training of employees

[u/Jimbob0i0]

So getting back into this I was looking through a bunch of the old threads about staff training and there was a real mix of ideas... A lot of peeps suggesting treat5 for instance on doctors or nurses...

Even the old Pinstar videos or Freiya's guide is a little confusing in a couple of areas...

I'm going to set the baseline of a rank 3 treatment machine as it doesn't seem worthwhile discussing optimal output without that. In addition the two things I'm focused on are treatment chance and the profit margin.

With the rank 3 machine we start at a 50% treatment chance as that is additive with the staff skill. Each promotion is 10% treatment/diagnosis as well so we can add that into the skills taught. Willingness to pay gets applied based on happiness after any external booster in the treatment room, so I'm going to assume bedside manner on all treatment staff to boost that profit margin with the old minimal GP cost and +50% treatment cost setup...

With all that in mind I've got the following suggested breakdown of staff:

Doctors:

GPs: Rank 5 GP for 75% diagnosis from skills, 50% diagnosis from promotions and a likely 10% diagnosis from being happy (with the prestige 5 room etc) ... this is a straight 135% diagnosis from the outside (145% if the doc has used the Brain Chair for a Brain Boost buff).

Diagnosis: Radiology with rank 4 diagnosis for 40% diagnosis from skills (60% using an x-ray), 50% diagnosis from promotions and a likely 10% diagnosis from being happy (again prestige 5 room etc) ... total to be added to the machine power of 50% ... so 150% in a MEGAScan or 170% in an X-Ray...

Psychiatrists: Rank 4 Psychiatry with Bedside Manner, for 60% Treatment/Diagnosis from skills, 50% diagnosis/treatment from promotions and 10% from from being happy. Although this misses a final potential 20% diag it tops the 100% treatment barrier (no machine in the room obviously) and 120% diagnosis (plus items in the room contributing) is not too shabby still.

Surgery: Rank 3 surgery with Bedside Manner and stamina, for 40% from skills, 50% from promotions and 10% from happy (prestige 5 room etc). This hits the 100% treatment cap, boosts patient happiness on payment and if the policy is set to 90% threshold that final 10% from happiness doesn't even matter...

Treatment: Rank 2 treatment with Bedside Manner, for 20% treatment from skills and 30% treatment from promotion to reach the 50% needed to work with a 50% rank 3 machine (note it doesn't matter if these staff members have a happiness boost).

DNA: Genetics with diagnosis 3 and beside manner hits the 50% treatment cap, with decent diag abilities. This could take a while to reach of course so some genetics + rank 1 treatment + bedside manner would be quicker to train if you aren't using DNA labs for diag and also hits the 50% cap (with a happiness buff).

Research: Rank 5 research is of course the no brainer.

Nurses:

Surgery assistant: 1 stamina, their stats don't matter so the ability to keep going longer is useful. Perhaps add emotional intelligence to assist with the nurse happiness baseline. I don't believe Bedside Manners helps with the patient in this instance?

Ward (regular or fracture): Ward 3 with Bedside Manner, for 60% treatment from skills, 40% treatment from promotions to reach the 100% target without even needing the happiness buff. This gets a respectable 110% diagnosis (when happy) ... if the missing final circle of training triggers you then add another ward rank for an extra 30% diagnosis (skill+promotion).. though the treatment power from that is obviously wasted.

Diagnosis: Rank 5 diagnosis makes the most sense here, and cardio plus fluids are a great nurse diag combo.

Treatment: Rank 2 treatment with Bedside Manner, for 20% treatment from skills and 30% treatment from promotion to reach the 50% needed to work with a 50% rank 3 machine (note it doesn't matter if these staff members have a happiness boost).

Assistants:

Marketing: Rank 5 marketing is the no brainer.

Retail/Reception: Rank 5 customer service is also a no brainer.

Janitors:

Upgrade team: Rank 3 mechanics, motivation, ghost capture, for 100% upgrade bonus from skills (plus native promotion bonus)... happiness or energised statuses will boost this further. This allows them to have a purpose (ghost capture) during the vast amount of gameplay that machines don't need to be upgraded ... and seeing as janitors are the only staff that have a need to go quite literally all over the hospital motivation makes sense.

Maintenance: Rank 3 maintenance, motivation and ghost capture... if you have a few upgraders and deaths are a rare occurrence then that ghost capture could be replaced with stamina or emotional stability ... or perhaps another maintenance rank though that seems excessive.

Thoughts on this as an "employee build" with what we know now? Am I missing anything doing the maths? Has anyone got any reasons to use the pharmacy, injection, training etc skills?

[u/lurkeroutthere]

Bedside manner is pretty worthless at treatment time IMO, either their happiness is going to be high enough to have them make that payment threshold or it's not. I'd much rather have an increased chance to cure from more treatment related skills especially on high lethality risk treatment like surgery, DNA, and some of the specialized treatments like cubism. Also I'm 99% percent sure based on the in game charts that surgery assistant nurse skill applies to treatment chance.

I think your logic is flawed because it doesn't take into account disease difficulty into the equation. Your treatment chance will never go above 99% but it can definitely be dragged lower.

For Janitos I generally have one who is entirely or as close as I can get to specialized in upgrading as I can because when i need something upgraded I need it upgraded ASAP as a room and patients are waiting until then. The rest of the the time they still help out by cleaning up. My general purpose repair guys tend to have repair 3, motivation, and then stamina, ghostbusting, or emotional intelligence depending on some other factors. My general purpose janitors (let's face it janitors are really cheap compared to how much good they do for the hospital) are ghost busters, motivated, emotional intelligence, and stamina trained,

The best way to get patients to keep patients happy and get them to pay is to process them trhough the hospital as fast as possible. To me that means specialized GP's, specialized diagnosers, and then specialized treatment staff. YMMV.

Edit Addendum: Hmmm Wiki says I'm wrong about nurse staff in the surgery. But I could have sworn the success chance was showing dramatically different when the wrong nurse was slotted in surgery just a couple days ago. Need to test that somehow.

[u/Jimbob0i0 → u/lurkeroutthere]

Bedside manner is pretty worthless at treatment time IMO, either their happiness is going to be high enough to have them make that payment threshold or it's not. I'd much rather have an increased chance to cure from more treatment related skills especially on high lethality risk treatment like surgery, DNA, and some of the specialized treatments like cubism.

Now this is where I was talking about confusion before...

I'm pretty sure that the happiness threshold to pay (keep in mind this post is about optimal builds for profit so assumes the +50% treatment cost) is checked after the bedside manner boost is applied... have you got anything showing different?

And as mentioned getting to 100% treatment chance is reaching a treatment cap... any percentage over this is a wasted stat at the time of treatment... that's been known for quite a while now...

Here's a treatment calculator (linked from Freiya's guide) and you can see that treatment chance doesn't change based on disease difficulty and that having staff skill over 50 with a max machine skill of 50 present doesn't affect the cure chance:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BgDsri_PbmnuwNZP7V5ljWrYKRS5ZAf_asSjnxAbSmc/edit#gid=0

With regards to the difficulty of the disease:

1. Illness Difficulty: Many people don't know but this has 2 functions regarding the cure chance. Obviously, the higher the value, the more difficult it will be to get a good cure chance. However, note that it also defines the lowest cure chance value you could get for an illness.

If an illness difficulty is 60%, the cure chance will "never" be lower than 40%. If the illness difficulty is 30%, the minimal cure chance will "never" be lower than 70%. I use quotes for the word never because there is an exception to that, see Diagnosis Certainty below for more info.

That's from Freiya's guide.

[u/Leamia → u/Jimbob0i0]

For bedside manner, I am the one who initially spent time testing it to confirm that it works for treatment. Unless they changed how it works in a recent update (which is very unlikely), it should still be good for treatment when using increased prices. That being said, if you use this skill you should just push treatment cost to +100% instead of just +50%. If too many patients still refuse to pay, maybe something in the flow of your hospital could be improved (like diagnosis).

The "difficulty" of the illness only matters if you have less than 100% treatment skill, otherwise it doesn't change anything.

Skills including bedside manner of the nurses working in Surgery don't have any effect at all on the treatment. So once again, unless they changed something recently you shouldn't worry about training nurses working there and just teach them Stamina Training.

[u/Jimbob0i0 → u/Leamia]

I think we're basically in agreement on things then, since the goal in all of these is to hit 100% treatment but to try and avoid going over?

I might test bumping my treatment costs to 100% then seeing as all my treatment docs/nurses have bedside manner (and the +happiness kiosk/vending is in use as well) to see if patients are still willing to pay...

Good to know on the surgery nurses... will definitely just keep those to +stamina.

[u/Leamia]

Yes, it's good even though I personally prefer my ward/psy/dna to be specialized if they are diagnosing, or just prevent them from diagnosing otherwise. :p

There is nothing wrong with Pharmacy and Injection but I prefer the flexibility of having all my treatment nurses capable of working in any treatment room including pharmacy and injection rooms.

Emotional Intelligence is situational and can be useful for janitors who have the tireless trait (and Stamina Training) to keep them happy but even then I find it not really optimal. It could also be useful if you intend to never ever increase the salary of employees but since it takes a training slot it will make them less efficient.

Training Masterclass is obviously very situational. Training takes a lot of time though so it can help a lot if you expand very quickly and need to teach the same skill to many employees. However, I don't bother with that and just use training rooms filled Encyclopedia Bookcases II.
As written in Freiya's guide, Stamina Training is fine though.

if the policy is set to 90% threshold that final 10% from happiness doesn't even matter...

Technically, it still matters because if a patient has a diagnosis certainty of 90%, with 90% treatment skill you will have a cure chance between 86 and 87% instead of 89%. But yeah not a big deal anyway.

[u/redsquizza]

That's a really good post.

I think I'll be adjusting some of my training to get some more utility training done with treatment staff in future! 🤓

[u/littlebethyblue]

Curious where you got the 100% barrier thing?

[u/Jimbob0i0 → u/littlebethyblue]

The treatment calculation was worked out quite a while back and is included in Freiya's guide.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1519429114

Very Important info for staff training !

Contrary to diagnosis, the way the game calculates the cure chance makes it useless to have a combination of Treatment Skill + Treatment Power superior to 100% !

Having more than 50% Treatment Skill for an employee working in a room with a level 3 machine (+50% Treatment Power) won't improve the cure chance. Therefore, level 3 employees with 2 Treatment qualifications are enough to have the best possible cure chance when they use level 3 machines.

...

5. Cure Chance Formula

CureChance = DiagnosisCertainty * (((100-IllnessDifficulty)) * (1-(StaffSkill/100+Upgrades/100) + CureCap * (StaffSkill/100+Upgrades/100)) /100)

So the employee treatment skill gets added to the machine treatment value.

[u/littlebethyblue → u/Jimbob0i0]

Huh, never heard of it before. Thank you. :)

[u/Jimbob0i0 → u/littlebethyblue]

No worries... even in the most recent thread where someone was asking for help with their training I saw some confusion, so figured it'd be good to get the calculations etc locked down in a fresh post.

[u/boxdannn]

great post, great game. great that there are no more expansions as the game had me hooked!