Playing on mission 5 (or 6), the one with easy epidemics. Took a money hit on the first one, but was deep in debt for the second so tried to cure it. Three people had some Daffy Duck like symbol over their heads. Tried to get a nurse to cure them, but she didn't do anything as far as I could see. At some point one of them left, some chap visited, and we had to pay a lot of money anyway, putting me on negative funds despite having a 45,000 maxed out loan. Great! :D

Exactly how do I cure them?

When I moused over the clock icon there was something about clicking on the contagious patients after clicking on the clock, but I couldn't see that it did anything at all. The mouse pointer changed form, but that was it. If they appear as often as this throughout the level, I'll never get out of this money hole and beat it. Have only seen and killed a few rats too, and haven't seen a single piece of garbage yet.

Thanks. How exactly would one pull off that curing bit though?

Tried to cure two more epidemics, but it went to hell basically. One of them only had one contagious person, and I think a nurse managed to vaccinate him (at leas I clicked on him, so I hope something happened - still said "I'm contagious" though). Then I went to slowest speed and looked through my entire hospital to see others with the same illness (The Squits). Couldn't find anybody else. The waiting area was pretty busy at this stage, however, so that didn't make it any easier. Had to create a third GP, and they still found it hard to cut down on queues.

Am I supposed to just let them go through the motions of be treated normally, or is there some trick to finding out who has what decease before they're diagnosed?

Also, I have great difficulty changing people's place in a queue. I left-click on them in the queue and drag them around, and the person kind of flashes, but when I drop him elsewhere in the queue, the patient just defaults back to where he was. Dropping him on top of a room seems to work a little better, but that's not really re-arranging the queue. Many times I've tried to get very sick people to the front of the queue, but it doesn't really seem to help. It's better to just sent them out on the street to die instead, which isn't exactly what hospitals are supposed to do.

In the end I managed to finish that epidemics mission called something-Wold, but I paid for every subsequent epidemics because I didn't know how to fight it, and must have paid about 100,000 for it. There also was a massive earthquake that must have dealt a crazy amount of damage, because all machines had plenty of safe room just before it occurred - yet both the operations room (and its doctors) exploded, plus the inflator room.

Hope epidemics don't occur this often in the future, because that was a nightmare, and simply not fun.

Epidemics are part of each subsequent level from now on.

But you can influence how often epidemics will occur with your hospital design. With a good design you will get no epidemics or very few and easy to cure epidemics.

Narrow corridors make epidemics more likely so try to avoid them. The biggest influence on epidemics are the waiting areas.
Don't use benches in your main corridors, people walking by waiting people is the number 1 cause for epidemics. Instead build small waiting areas offside the main corridor.

Epidemics can be a hell and start you into a real downward spiral, so it's best to make sure they don't occur at all.

Also the amount of the fine you have to pay if you declare an epidemic is a sign for its difficulty. If it's high it's often better to pay it then to try to contain it. I normally only try to contain epidemics that would otherwise cost me 3000 or 6000, anything higher and i pay the fine. As far as i know they have to be treated normally. If the diagnose-level is really high it is sometimes possible to guess the diseases (button in the patient-window), the only thing you can do is give them priority in queues.
But i have also lost some epidemics because the last infected patient really had to go to the toilet instead of waiting another 5 seconds to be cured...

About the queuses:
In a queue-window dragging a person onto the door will put this person at the front of the queue, dragging a person on the sign to the right will put him at the end of the queue.
Another option is to right-click a person and resend him to the reception. He will leave the queue, go to the reception and is then directed to the room again.

Thanks, that is really good advice. Tried mission 7 at Greenpool, implementing proper waiting areas, but it was difficult. Then I took a 12 man emergency, 6 died, and I gave up when the game told me I'd lose if 10 more patients died. Had barely started! :D

Due to lack of space and money it's so difficult to get a decent collection of rooms together early in the right places. A proper waiting area makes this worse, but I know it's the right way. Usually I buy lots of stuff from the beginning and go deep in debt, but this time I tried to not do that. Meant turning away a lot of patients, which could have made us good money if there was an operation theatre and ward.

I already used wide hallways, but used to place at least some benches outside rooms so patients would get in earlier, and take off some of the pressure in the reception area.

Would be excellent if there was a Pause function while building the starting hospital. Even at slowest speed it was February quite quickly.

On this note, do you have any advice for how to set up the hospital early? Do you buy more plots of land and set up some wings right away, or do you turn away lots of patients until you can afford expansions?

It's actually a difficult game because there are so many things that can go wrong. At least on these later levels, where you need research and training rooms from the start, which take a lot of space. The starting areas look so big at first, but put in reception, GP, a waiting area, toilet and staff room, general diagnosis, then pharmacy and psychiatric and you quickly run out of room. Then the Operations Threatre and Ward, which take a ton of space too. Gah! :D

Easy to learn, hard to master.

Ok some tipps for the start of a new level:

The initial hospital should include the following:
1-2 GP Offices
1 Psychatrie
1 Pharmacy
1 General Diagnosis or Ward (sometimes both is possible, in most cases the ward is the better choice)
1 Toilett
And of course waiting areas.

If the initial staff recruitment includes a resarcher and money permits it i buy a second plot of land and build the staff room and resarch room there.
If that is not possible the main plot gets a small staff room.
If you can get a consultant in the beginning scrap the General diagnosis.

I try to avoid going into debt right at the beginning because it takes quite some time for additional cure rooms to pay for themself, especially when the patient flow still has to pick up in the beginning.

If space and money permits i may build the avaible clinics, but they are not as urgent as the other rooms.

The operation theatre is a serious source of income but at the same time it costs quite a lot. Not only the 8k the room itself it costs, but you need a moderate sized ward and you need surgeons. Two are required to operate the room, with all going in the hospital and breaks, its better to build the OP if you have 3 or 4 surgeons avaible.
Because these doctors cost quie a lot the operating theatre is not in my normal building plan at the beginning.
To illustrate this: I completed level6 - the first level where you encounter epidemics - in 4 or 5 game years. The operating theatre was the last cure room i built on that level, because skilled surgeons weren't avaible to recruit and the self-training took some time.

Small cure rooms like the inflator or the slack tounge clinic have a smaller investment and therefore pay for themself quicker, meaning you will earlier start a profit from them.

Usually i start my first expansion at the beginning of the second year, thanks to bonuses and because the patient flow reaches a nice level. This expansion often includes the training room, so i can start training doctors (especially surgeons).
The operating theatre then can be part of the second expansion in year 3.

Thanks, that is excellent information. Have tried to find something about this online, but it's hard just finding anything about the game, never mind a guide.

Just finished mission 7 now, Greenpool. This was before reading your guide. Was a bit of a rough start, but this time I didn't buy land until I could actually afford it, instead of borrowing money for it. Didn't build any clinic rooms either for a very long time. But did build a training and research room right off the bat. Didn't build an operations room for a long time either, but it was the first cure room I built, in a new plot of land.

Finished that mission in 2003, which I think was year 4. Cured about 330 out of 500 people, so lots were turned away in the first year or two. Built proper waiting areas, but we still got maybe 10 epidemics. Here is a picture of the main waiting area near the reception and 3 GPs: http://i898.photobucket.com/albums/ac183/Pangaea666/Theme%20Hospital/Waitingarea.png

Does that look okay? Or should it be separated even more from the receptions themselves?

Guess in hindsight I could have expanded the leftmost waiting area and moved the top GP closer to the entry/exit - but I often find that when the waiting area is too far removed from rooms, they just stand outside the rooms instead of sitting down in the waiting area.

The starting area of mission 8 was gigantic compared to earlier missions, so should be plenty of room there. Interesting that we can just use the Ward instead of General diagnosis, that's one room less I need to build. Will try to think out a reasonable design there - maybe it's big enough to include all diagnostics room. That would be great.

Hey dudes,

Hope this topic's still alive, I don't intend to steal the topic, more like get help from two people that actually know what they're doing, as opposed to me. I started TH about 3 days ago as well (because the last time I played it my english wasn't good enough to understand and enjoy it sufficiently). Stuck at mission 6 now to (Thingy-on-the-Wold, the first one with the epidemics) and played it through once, but got completely screwed over by the epidemics.
The problem was the epidemics just didn't stop. After one epidemic ended I literally had like 5 minutes before the next one would come, leaving me next to no time to recover from the first fine (because I just had no way to prevent them, I'll get to that later).Having read your posts, I'd say it's because of my economy-efficient way of playing. I have played through the first 5 levels without ever having to take out a loan, but to achieve that had to cram as many rooms as I could in each building. I personally thought the starting area of level 6 was excessively big, considering I could fit all my basic stuff in there (2 GP offices, a pharmacy, General Diagnosis, Ward, Operating theater, the basic clinics (Inflator, Slack Tongue and Fracture), a research room, toilets, staff room and could've fitted a training room in there as I saw fit. I guess this is what made the epidemics rise up uncessantly. Added an attachment of what it looks like. As you can see, a lot of narrow passageways, and waiting areas for everyone to see. So you'd suggest isolating the waiting areas, do any of you have any intel yet on wether the way Pangaea666 showed it works or not?
I liked the idea of starting out with more than one GP, I didn't even think of that. Mostly I'd just start out with one and really really late, when the queues were allready piling up, adding to the epidemics. Also, does the diagnosis a General Diagnosis offer equal the diagnosis a Ward offers? This would be really easy, as it wouldn't require a GD right away. One more thing: MagicMagor, you said to scrap the General Diagnosis if you could get a consultant. Why's that?

Another thing, when one occurs, I'm completely at a loss on how to stop it. I get the whole curing part, but usually there will be 2 to 5 people infected at the start, which should be possible in the alloted time. If that time would actually indicate how long you have. Usually by the time I'm done immunizing the infected dudes, the timer instantly fills, the advisor pops up and tells me the minister is allready on his way, while only about 1/5th of the timer has passed. Is this the same for you? If not, do you know what causes the minister to arrive early and what I can do about it? Because the time it takes for him to come is hardly enough to immunize everyone, let alone cure them.
I have possibly found a bug that gives you more time though. A different internet source told me that you'll have lost once the health inspector reaches your reception desk. So I tried deleting all my reception desks as soon as the inspector arrives. This didn't work, but as I'd allready payed for about 3 failed epidemics that month, I was on -20.000 and couldn't place any new reception desks, so 5 minutes later the next epidemic came and even though my advisor told me the inspector was on his way, he wouldn't arrive, I assumed because I still didn't have any reception desks. I didn't get to see how the epidemic ended though, because after I had cured most of the infected dudes the last one (who was on a cardio) exploded when my cardio was destroyed in an earthquake, and this wouldn't prompt the epidemic to end.

Lastly, I found that almost always it's worth it to try and cover up the epidemic. Most of the epidemics I occured gave me a fine of like 40,000 to declare it, which would put me on low enough a balance to instantly lose the game at the end of the year, so I tried to fight it, and when I got busted by the inspector, they only charged me about 12,000. Once they didn't even fine me when I failed to cover it, but instead evacuating my hospital (which rid me of the excessive queues that had piled up, therefore preventing a 5 minute followup on the epidemic). Also, sometimes when I failed to cover up, the report didn't say my reputation was lowered. I didn't check if it had actually lowered, but sometimes the report specifically told me I took a hit to the reputation and sometimes it didn't.

I hope you guys have more tips for me, as while this game is a lot of fun, it's also wicked difficult. Thanks anyway for everything you've taught me so far.

Because you don't need it. One thing to remember is that it's the treatment that makes the real money. So to make a decent profit you want to treat as many patients as possible. So a faster diagnose means more treated patients in the same time.

A consultant in the GP office can diagnose most easy diseases right away, without the patient visiting any diagnose room. Apart from that you already have at least one diagnose room - the psychatrie - so even some harder diseases may be diagnosed with the help of that room.
That setup can cover a lot of diseases in the beginning. If additional diagnose power is needed the ward can offer that. Compared to GD the ward has several advantages. First it is operated by a nurse, so your doctors are free for more important tasks. (You only need nurses for the pharmacy, the ward and the fracture clinic, 2 or 3 are in most cases enough, while your doctors have a lot more tasks and are more expensive)
Second it can hold several patients at the same time. While this is of course depending on the room size even in a rather small ward three beds are possible. So 3 patients can be diagnosed at the same time compared to the 1 patient in GD.
Third is, if you have a Operating theatre you need the ward anyway. Just make it bigger.

Later when more difficult diseases show up and more diagnose power is needed you may already have access to the real diagnosis-powerhouses. X-Ray and especially the scanner. I rarely need the GD if i have these two rooms. I'm not sure, but i think so. The GD is a pretty basic diagnosis room so i believe its diagnosis power is also pretty basic. If you need a GD at all you only need it in the beginning, after you get the X-ray and the scanner the GD isn't that important anymore. And psychatrie + ward + consultant GP can already diagnose a lot. Yes the design of pangae is the right idea. What you build, narrow passages and benches in the hallway are what causes the epidemics.
I will post a screenshot of my waiting area design tomorrow, and i rarely have problems with epidemics anymore.

One trick/exploit concerning epidemics is saving as soon as you see the symbol popping up. If you then load this game, the symbol will vanish when you click it without any epidemic occuring. Usefull as a last resort, but it feels like cheating to me. I don't think that can be generalized. Maybe you got lucky or there is some other factor. I don't know how the fine is calculated you have to pay if the inspector find an epidemic, but for me it is in most cases bigger than the declaring-fine.

I've tried another game, this time with the waiting areas and a more organized hospital, as well as a proper training room (with a Research/Psych/Surgeon consultant teaching), and leaving out the GD. I didn't even notice that the GD was missing, so yeah, was definitely a good idea. I did feel the Cardio was useful though (not saying that you said it wasn't, but that was what popped up in my head when I decided to leave out the GD this time).

It all went well, I even tackled the first few epidemics, until the epidemics did their old "you get 5 seconds to win this thing" trick on me. I'm pretty sure none of the infected dudes left but nonetheless in 1/10th of the time at best the inspector allready shows up and robs me. You got any intel on that? I really can not imagine how they decide when to send in the inspector.
Added a pic of what my waiting areas looked like. did I make them too small? Miss out on something? In the end it had no effect, it was still living from epidemic to epidemic, with at most 5 minutes between each, though they mostly just followed nearly instantly after each other. I'll take a look at your design when you post it and compare it to mine.

About the trick, yeah I feel the same way. If I have to cheat to get my way through the game it's no fun to me. I haven't tried out the reception desk trick again for the same reason. The point with these epidemics is, I don't understand how they work. In the beginning the inspectors just appear according to the timer, but for the later ones you don't even have enough time to cure one of them (on 1 epidemic the inspector allready arrived in the time it took me to immunize everyone, with the game speed still on 1).

First off I just have to take you up on the last sentence and get something off my chest. Am on the last mission now, Battenberg, and had yet another emergency. 14 people were to be cured for something. Had 2 pharmacies and a 100% drug, and 3 nurses, so all should be fine. Right?

But no. Every time an emergency comes round, all staff turn into slobbering knuckle draggers and decide to leave the room, no matter how often I put them back in it, even though there are lines outside it. Drives me batshit insane each and every time. So I just rage-quit when yet more people died unnecessarily to those retards. I almost wonder if the programmers had a planning session. "Allright people, how can we most effectively piss off people?" "Harr-harr, this is *really* evil, but I have a good idea. How about making all staff leave the relevant rooms when during emergencies? That will annoy them something out of this world." "Hahahhahahaha! That's *awesome*!! We GOTTA do this shit!"

From that fine rant, let's return to your issues.

I'm not sure if it really helps a lot to have wide corridors and such. One problem is that patients are idiots, so if the waiting area is too far away from rooms (which isn't far at all), they'll just stand outside the room instead of moving those fine legs of theirs a few steps to sit their behinds on a nice comfy seat. So it's best not to place it in a corner for example, as many rooms will be too far away. Based on the missions I've played so far, I do think it helps though. Since I started making wider corridors and separate waiting areas (instead of rows of benches outside each room), I've not had as many epidemics, or at least not as many serious (expensive) epidemics.

A consultant will give better diagnosis than normal doctors, so patients don't need as many rounds to the GP office or various diagnosis rooms. Quite often they can get it right on the first time and send them to be cured. So in that sense you don't need as many diagnosis rooms. Furthermore, later on you will get access to many different diagnosis rooms, but the last mission I only built scanner, x-ray and cardio, plus general diagnosis and GPs. That was enough. Scanner especially can deal with a lot of diseases it seems. Think I prefer to have a general diagnosis room though, because when I just relied on a ward, I think we had more people with partial diagnosis who I had to send home. Maybe others have more info on that though.

Epidemics are a real pain to deal with, and there will be lots of them, no matter how you design the hospital it seems. Sometimes a ton of people come, and then you're almost sure to get an epidemic of some degree, because so many are in the waiting areas. So to me it seems like possibly the best defense is an effective way to deal with them via several GP offices.

Whether you can deal with an epidemic by treating people relies on how the hospital is set up, usually the starting area. If that building happens to be tiny, like on the last mission, it's almost hopeless. Why? Because to get treated they often have to leave the building for cure rooms or the ward. When a patient with epidemic leaves a building to go outside, the health inspector will automatically be summoned. This is why you see the timer is suddenly out.

If this happens, your best bet is to click on each smitten patient and send him home. If they all leave before the health inspector comes, you can still succeed and get the money. The timer will also fill up if you succeed to cure all patients. I've found that epidemics up to 6000 is possible to deal with, but any more than that and it's just too many people and it spreads too easily, so can be a nightmare to deal with. Best to just pay the fine really.

One important thing when you get the dreaded epidemic message is to instantly put the speed on the slowest. You can do this by pressing "1" (3 is normal speed, 5 fastest). Then you have more time to immunise people and find where they are and how to deal with it.

I don't pay any attention to reputation decrease, because curing patients will keep it high enough anyway, provided you don't kill too many people. If you get an epidemic that costs for example 12,000, it's best to just pay than to try to cure it. Unless the fine is less than 12000 I suppose, but from failing to cure I've often tound the fine is steeper than what I had to pay for the auto-cure.


When it comes to design, I've now basically employed a design where I have one central hallway with rooms to either side. The hallway should be 3 squares, but at the least 2. That makes people flow better through it, and hopefully it reduces the threat from epidemics too. Sometimes this gets a little tricky due to building design and connecting buildings, but I always try to have a wide hallway. It looks more realistic too. Then I make designated waiting areas that sort of take up the space of one room. Recently I've tried to make some of them pretty big, for example with space for 4 rows of benches - two along each wall and then a double out in the middle. That seems to work okay. The problem is that patients are idiots more often than not, so unless this is a pretty central area they will just stand outside the room anyway instead of sit down.

Am on a different computer now, but can fire up the game on the other one later and try to take come pictures. It's not a blueprint way to do it perhaps, but it has worked okay for me lately, without too much trouble from epidemics. They still occur perhaps a few times a year, but as long as they're not expensive it's possibly to deal with them. Besides, in the late missions there are so many patients that money flows in after a few years and that easily covers the odd epidemic.

Btw, it's a very good idea to get research and training up ASAP, and grab the specialists you need right away. For example, on the last mission I didn't get a surgeon from the start, so couldn't build an operations theatre. But at some point a surgeon doctor showed up and I hired him. Then trained him to consultant and let him take over the training. So soon I'll have two more consultant surgeons and can finally build that OR.

On this mission I also hired some consultant researchers right away (and trained some others) and put them into the research room. Then upgraded it with a computer and atom analyser when they became available. This actually meant that we for the most part stayed ahead of the curve in terms of cure rooms, so we didn't lose too many patients that had to be sent home. In the last missions this can be a problem, because you need to treat about 70% of visitors, and after a few years basically nothing but juniors are available to hire, so you need to get your consultant and specialists in early, and then train up consultants yourself.

Will see if I can get up some screenshots. Still early in the last mission, but at least the reception area should be 'finished' now. The other buildings I need to re-move rooms a bit when I have money to buy new buildings so we can have proper diagnosis and cure areas.

Yeah, they are probably a little to small.
A waiting area of mine takes up the same space as a normal GP Office 5x5.
Basic design looks like this:
WWWWWW
WB FR BW
WB BW
WB BW
WB P BW
WB BW
WD

Legend:
W - Wall
B - Bench
F - Fire extingusher
R - Radiator
P - Plant
D - Drinking machine

Edit: I hope the layout is clear, the forum stripped the additional whitespaces i put in. Basicly its two rows of 5 benches facing each other inside a U-shape.

Ten benches are roughly enough for 2 rooms. (Maximum queue size per room is 6 by default, so 5 benches is about ok - you don't really want to operate at maximum capacity)
Such a U-Shape is the optimum, i try to take this into account when placing my rooms, but sometimes a L-shape is needed.

The most important advice i can give is to be patient. Start small and expand in small steps. On plot per year is a good guideline for me.

Its better to start with a really small (in number of rooms) but efficient hospital than try to scram as much rooms as possible into your starting land. Once the epidemics reach the state of 5-minutes between two, all you can do is restart the level.

A ton of other posts now, which I will read soon, but am adding two pictures from the reception on the last mission. Actually only have 2 GPs, so may need to make changes, but for the moment this works well.

Reception 1
Reception 2

Have added some benches outside the pharmacies, mainly to deal with emergencies, but also to help with plurks who don't sit down in the waiting area and instead stand outside the psychiatrist. Maybe they have issues... :D

Have finished the last mission, and it went very well in terms of epidemics. Barely had any at all, and it took 9 years to win the level. All we had were 3 minor epidemics that would have cost 2,000. In terms of preventing epidemics this was by far the most successful level.

The two features I think are important here, as MagicMagor says above, are wide hallways and designated waiting areas. You also need to be able to deal with the flow of patients to the reception area. If people pile up there, you are quite likely to get an epidemic. I didn't make any changes to the starting area from the pictures above, so it "only" had 2 GPs, but we had 2 elsewhere also, which helped to take some of the heat off in busy times, and largely prevented partially diagnosed patients from returning to the reception area.

Reception
Diagnosis 1
Diagnosis 2
Cure 1
Cure 2
Cure 3
Operations Theatre
---
Research
Hall of Fame
Charts

Last three pictures are irrelevant for the waiting areas design, but since I took screenshots of it I uploaded them as well.

Near the OR, some people who came from the north would not go and sit down, so I placed a couple of benches there. Think those were the only benches directly outside rooms.

Ok, here are the promised pictures of my waiting areas. It's level8 on hard, still on the first year.

While i have some problems at that level, epidemics aren't one of them. Just had my first epidemic at my second year. However the cause in that case was probably the missing second GP office, because only one office couldn't handle the increase in patient flow.