Chasing the Elusive Third Star in Two Point Hospital

I'm still going strong with hospital management game Two Point Hospital and I've gotten to the point where the scenarios are downright devious.  One level featured the combined repair nightmare of volcanic eruptions--which spew balls of flaming magma into your hospital and require being extinguished AND being mopped up--with the rumbly doom of earthquakes.  I spent much of that specific map (Shockley, I think) placing numerous fire extinguishers and rushing janitors to any smoking machine.  Mostly, I managed to avoid any explosions...but there were a few.  The worst part about explosions is that you have to buy new machines and upgrade them all over again.  This is much preferable to the outcome in the original Theme Hospital, where explosions would kill anyone in the room--patients or staff--and the room would be rendered unusable, which was a pain the butt because space could be very much at a premium.

The starting building in Rotting Hill.  It's a little shabby at first.

The newest scenario I have been facing is reforming the hospital at Rotting Hill.  It's one of those oddball levels where you actually start with a small, basic building filled with semi-broken machinery, a few untrained staff members, and a whole bunch of unattended janitorial duties.  Immediately I hired a janitor and set them to work repairing the smoking machines and cleaning up the rest of my small building.  In a way it was kind of nice not to have to build the basics; there was already a GP's office, general diagnosis, and psychiatry room.  After some frenzied janitorial activity the machinery was repaired and the building was cleaned up.

Rotting Hill features a few real challenges.  In order to gain stars players are required to cure a certain number of patients, raise their hospital value to a certain amount (neither of those two are exceptionally challenging), and, the real challenge, to raise staff morale to a certain percentage.  There are several ways to raise staff morale with the easiest way being to make sure that staff are taking adequate breaks to address their basic needs--doing this will keep morale at an acceptable level.  Getting and keeping staff morale above 70% can be challenging, the only real solution is raising staff pay into the "happy" zone.  This will definitely cut into your profits, but is much easier if you wait until the hospital has accrued a decent amount of money.  Raising morale is made doubly difficulty because of the fact that simply working in Rotting Hill gives all your staff a -10% happiness debuff.  Investing some training points in emotional intelligence will save you some morale hassles.

Rotting Hill properties are scattered and require lots of walking.

One of the other challenges of Rotting Hill is the layout of the map.  All the property on the map is spread out and requires patients and staff to travel between buildings.  Travel usually isn't a problem under normal circumstances, but in the case of needing a janitor to extinguish a piece of flaming equipment, it can require extra time.  I've also found that my janitors like to spend time in certain buildings while mostly ignoring some of the others--garbage accumulates, vending machines run out of goods, and toilets wind up clogged.  One feature that I wish they would add is the ability to assign staff to a certain area.  Keeping one to two janitors per building would help to ensure that my janitors don't have to try to make a mad dash across the extremely spread out map to extinguish a fire.

I'm making progress on Rotting Hill, but the third star for this particular hospital requires a daunting 95% morale.  It looks like everyone is getting a raise!  The volume of patients showing up for treatment has also been quite high and it always feels like my GP's offices are completely swamped.  It also feels like there is a very broad range of diseases to treat and that I'm building a large number of different treatment rooms.  All in all, it's a challenge.

Two Point Hospital has, so far, been everything that I hoped a new and improved version of Theme Hospital would be.  It's not perfect, and has been plagued by a few bugs such as the fracture ward bug I mentioned last week (if you're noticing that patients seem to be getting stuck near the plaster caster, change into the beta version of the recent update--the bug is fixed in that version).  I ran into another bug on the Blighton map where it would not roll over to three stars upon completion of a 90% hygiene rate (which took so long to finally accomplish--it's a real pain!).  Luckily, it seems like the devs are largely trying to address these bugs and certain requests for added features--one of the most popular requests seems to be the ability to copy rooms, which would save a great amount of time when building rooms like the GP's office.