Prevent Upgrade to Consultant

[Haravikk]

I'm not sure if this counts as a bug or not, but one annoying behaviour I've found is that if a doctor progresses to the rank of consultant, then they are no longer capable of learning to be a surgeon, psychiatrist or researcher, even if they already have progress to any of these professions.

I think a better behaviour would be for a doctor to only begin progress towards becoming a consultant after they have learned a specialisation (or if they already had one). This way it is always possible to train an unspecialised doctor in something.

The only side effect of this really is that then you would lose the ability to have a consultant level general practitioner, though this could possibly be addressed by having a GP speciality, but instead of limiting use of GP rooms to such doctors, the specialisation could allow them to make a diagnosis much more quickly, or command better prices from patients or some other suitable bonus. The alternative might to have the restriction kick in for juniors only, who would never progress to doctor until taught (even though they can still practice in general rooms), but that might be a bit too annoying as it would require you to build a training room early on.

[Serial Colour]

This is a nice idea.

Your conclusion that it would be to train to Consultant regular GP level (i.e. no specialisations) is wrong, though, assuming you can find a Consultant regular GP in the first place - just get them to teach and the students will simply progress to Consultant status (unless they have a half-learnt specialisation holding them back, but even then they can still improve their abilities so learning time isn't wasted).

A possible addendum might be to specify which specialisations a certain doctor should aim for, completely ignoring the others. If a Researcher is teaching a Psychologist who doesn't want to learn Research, they will simply progress towards Consultant level instead (perhaps at a slower rate because the teacher is spending some of his time teaching his specialisations and less time teaching Consultancy). However, this idea doesn't quite feel right to me; it's hard to explain, but it's something to do with meddling in their lives (I know you do plenty of that already, which is why it's hard to explain).

In any case, half-learnt specialisations shouldn't be shown for Consultants if there's no way for them to carry on learning them. It's tidier that way.

[Haravikk]

Your conclusion that it would be to train to Consultant regular GP level (i.e. no specialisations) is wrong, though, assuming you can find a Consultant regular GP in the first place - just get them to teach and the students will simply progress to Consultant status (unless they have a half-learnt specialisation holding them back, but even then they can still improve their abilities so learning time isn't wasted).

Normally doctors will progress to Consultants over time (or by doing stuff, I'm not sure exactly); even if you grab all junior doctors at the start of a level they should all be Consultants at the end of the level wether you teach them or not.

What I'm proposing is that this progression will stop at Doctor level, unless they have a speciality as a Surgeon, Psychiatrist or Researcher, which I think will help to avoid situations where your non-specialists become untrainable by Consultants with the skills you want to pass onto them.
The problem with that is that then you would never be able to gain new Consultant GPs, unless that were added as a new speciality (of sorts).



Actually, thinking about it I think the simplest solution might to just remove the learning restriction of the original game, so that Consultants can still be sent to learn whatever skill(s) are currently being taught. Basically the first consultant you drop onto a training room should become the teacher, and all other doctors dropped into the room (regardless of their level) will progress towards learning any specialities they don't already know.

For the sake of sanity though it may make sense to have a limit of how many specialities you can learn, say to two. Otherwise you could train any doctor to be a specialist of all three types, and maybe change the rate of learning so higher level doctors will learn more slowly, while juniors can be trained (relatively) quickly.

[Alberth]

For the sake of sanity though it may make sense to have a limit of how many specialities you can learn, say to two. Otherwise you could train any doctor to be a specialist of all three types...

The current implementation limits the specialities to one, I think exactly for the reason you say, having a full consultant staff in everything just spoils all fun.

The current system somewhat has a mind of its own, which in my opinion is good. It makes the game less predictable and more challenging.



If you remove such things, eventually you'll end up with a sandbox game without any challenge at all.

[Haravikk]

The current system somewhat has a mind of its own, which in my opinion is good. It makes the game less predictable and more challenging.

You mean the CorsixTH implementation? In the original I've definitely used consultants with two specialisations to produce doctors fully trained in the same two specialisations. I've never tried with a doctor that already has the third though, to see if it's possible to get all three.

If you remove such things, eventually you'll end up with a sandbox game without any challenge at all.

I agree, but the problem is that the way it works in the original doctors will eventually become Consultants either simply over time or by working. But this can actually happen while they're in the training room learning, which isn't very good. Actually, maybe a simpler fix then would be to just have them not gain experience at all while assigned to the Training room? This wouldn't affect Consultants, and makes sense for others since they're not actually working.