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Epidemics and Family Doctors

Started by salamander, June 07, 2014, 08:51:55 AM

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salamander

It wouldn't surprise me to find out this has already been discussed, but threads dealing with hospitals seem to get a lot of posts, and I very well could have overlooked this as I browsed them.  If so, apologies.

I'm a very slow player, and although I've been playing Banished for many weeks, now, I really haven't started that many games.  Maybe I've been lucky, but I have not had many epidemics -- lots and lots of outbreaks, but they usually don't go beyond 2-3 infected townsfolk, and they die out quickly.  In my current game, though, I finally had what I would call an actual epidemic (influenza), with 15-20 infected folks at its peak and which lasted multiple years.

I was waiting for other things to happen in the town, so to kill some time I kept an eye on the infected folks as they walked around.  Part of this tracking (very informal with no data being recorded) was to see where in the town the infected folks were.  My thought was to see if I had a good distribution of hospitals to take care of sick folks.  I would cycle through the 3 hospitals I had, adding up the number of patients.  That number always agreed with the number of infected folks reported at the top of the General Statistics screen (with the skull and crossbones icon).  But even though the two numbers agreed, there were always infected folks still wandering around, either on their way to the doctor or still completing a task.  I had always assumed that the number of patients reported by a hospital was the number of patients actually in the hospital.  But, it seems that when a new person becomes infected, they are added to a hospital's patient roster, even if they are still out and about.

The other side of this is that I thought that infected folks, when they finally decided to go to the doctor, would go to the nearest hospital, similar to dropping off goods at the nearest barn or stockpile.  Instead, newly infected folks seem to be 'assigned' to a particular hospital, ie, their 'family doctor', and that's the only hospital they will visit, even if that means trooping across half the town, infecting others as they stagger along.  That does not seem to be the case, although I don't have the information to say how the assignment is made.  With how other assignments work in the game, it seems reasonable that the family doctor (and, therefore, hospital) assignment is based on where their home is located.

At first, I found this interesting in the sense that you learn something new everyday -- and I'm constantly learning new things about this game, either from experience or by reading posts here -- but after I thought about it for a few minutes, I realized that this could really change the 'where' and 'how many' of hospital building.  If my (many) assumptions are right, large population centers with many houses might need multiple hospitals, rather than having hospitals spread more or less evenly across the map.

rkelly17

@salamander, I've looked closely at the epidemic and hospital thing and your observations seem right to me. The numbers reported are for "sick people assigned to this hospital," not "sick people actually inside here." I'd say that "ideal" hospital placement for larger settlements is to have them placed off main thoroughfares where people can get to them by passing the fewest idling hot spots getting there. In my observation idling people and children playing are the number 1 groups susceptible to catching the disease, followed by people who are working in close proximity to the hospital. As I've said many places, when I first started playing I put schools and hospitals right next to each other--big mistake! It was like a epidemic-extending machine.

A fun thing to try sometime if you need cheap thrills: Wait to build the hospital until after you have an epidemic and about 15 or so are sick. They all "visit the doctor" by standing outside the front door of their houses. Then when the hospital finishes and you staff it they all take off toward the hospital at the same time. All those yellow skull and crossbones icons streaming across the map can be quite entertaining. OK, OK, maybe warped, but entertaining none the less.

mariesalias

I agree, just like schools, you want to spread them out a little to ensure your people don't have to walk too far (or through too many popular areas) to get to the doctor. But as @rkelly17  said, you don't want them actually in your dense population areas.

Demonocracy

Somehow I missed the posts about this topic until now.

I thought that the number of patients as listed on the Hospital information window was how many people are actually in there getting treatment.

I guess I've never really let it continue to be slow to take notice.  Every time an epidemic pops up, it takes my x10 speed down to a x1, and I nudge it right back up to x10 speed. 

salamander

@Demonocracy -- That's exactly what I thought; I just sort of stumbled across the number reported being those 'assigned' rather than 'in residence'.  @rkelly17 has posted about hospitals quite a bit, and I've kept up with those threads, but I must have missed that little tidbit.

@mariesalias and @rkelly17 -- After reading those other hospital discussions, I intentionally built my hospitals out of the way, although one of them was built without thinking about expansion and is now probably too close to other buildings.

I've been building hospitals just like schools, with the exception that in large population centers, I'll build more than one school to meet the demand of the area's kids, whereas single hospitals really were just 'scattered' to cover different areas of the town.  Now, I'm thinking large population centers may require more than hospital as well.  I wonder if my recent epidemic would have lasted as long if I'd had an additional hospital near my largest concentration of houses.

I have to say I'm impressed by how the epidemics seem to work.  They really do seem to be proximity based (as they should be), and I can't imagine that was all that easy for Luke to code into the game.  In particular, tunnels (and probably other choke points) seem to be what @rkelly17 called 'epidemic-extending machines'.  It's kind of neat to watch healthy folks go into one end of the tunnel, a walking incubator enter the other end, and everybody leaves infected.

salamander

Quote from: Demonocracy on June 07, 2014, 07:32:57 PM
Every time an epidemic pops up, it takes my x10 speed down to a x1, and I nudge it right back up to x10 speed. 

I'm pretty sure you can turn that automatic going to 1x in the options if it annoys you.

rkelly17

@Demonocracy, I'd be a bit careful about bumping up to 10X during an epidemic. Patience is not my middle name and I normally play at 10X (pausing to do anything serious), but it is possible that running at 10X makes the epidemic worse. I'm not sure of that and I'm not sure how you would prove it one way or the other, but lately I've let it run at 1X until the last person gets well and I've never had more than 3 sick at once. At 10X I've had as many as 30, but my hospitals were also arranged a bit differently.

Demonocracy

I've never had a particularly eventful epidemic.  I had one where it took out a handful of people, but I always bump it up to x10.  At first I was uncertain and watched the one villager get to the hospital and waited until he got out at x1, but it didn't seem to make any difference when the speed was increased.

Then again... maybe I had a bit of luck on my side.  From what I've been reading about everyone else's experience with outbreaks, I've had it pretty easy.

Kaldir

I've never had any severe epidemics either. I had one person dying yesterday from a disease that spread to 15 people in total, but that was the worst I've ever seen so far. I always play at 2x speed, and sometimes let it on 1x speed during the disease outbreak.

I've always played with disasters off. Are the epidemics worse with disasters on, or is there no difference?

Greydragon

i have just started playing with disasters on and havent had any outbreaks yet  i had them all the time with disasters off

Kaldir

I played a town for 68 years (disasters off), and only had 2 diseases. One infecting 15 people and claiming one victim, while the other only had 2 infections. And my hospital is right in the busy town center, next to a graveyard, two wells and two schools (I know, not smart, but it looked good!).

irrelevant

My first town I had disasters on, and had two epidemics (plus one tornado--in year 6, thanks a lot--and a couple of fires) in 32 years. Scores of folks got sick, but only a couple died. Lost a lot of productivity though.

Current town in year 38, disasters off, no epidemics so far, knock on wood.

rkelly17

Turning disasters off does not prevent epidemics. As time goes on epidemics seem to get more frequent. Somewhere it says that trading introduces disease,  but I've had at least one epidemic in year 1 before my citizens had even built a house. If you admit nomads, of course, the odds of epidemics increase but denying nomads does not seem to lessen the odds.

irrelevant

#13
Year 44, population 630, disasters off. Just had an outbreak of typhus. Patient Zero wandered down the Main street, past the town hall, thru the downtown market, and spent a good while idling at a port with 12 traders. Only one other citizen became ill. I think RNG gods smiled on me today.

This was my first epidemic. I have consistently denied nomads since I accepted 9 of them the first time they showed up.