War Hospital is a game that's all about tough decisions. As a hospital near the frontline in WWI, your base is the only thing capable of saving the hundreds of injured soldiers coming your way. The optimist in you might want to try and save every patient that comes your way. However, war is cruel and unpredictable, and you won't always be in the best position to assign patients.
With limited resources, it's essential that you make the best use of them and save the most lives. So today, we'll take a look at all the factors that go into choosing the priority for patients and provide some tips for you to note when scheduling patients. Let's go over how to assign and prioritise patients in War Hospital.
While you're here, be sure to check our full War Hospital review and learn how to increase your Morale!
How to manage patients in War Hospital
War Hospital is full of important decisions requiring many different considerations simultaneously. Soldiers who can't be saved have to be sent to the deny list. Today, we'll go over five of the most important factors to remember.
Check operation difficulty
Every injured soldier who comes to you will have a small card that displays two things within a ranking that goes up to six stars. The first one is the energy required for the operations, while the second is the chance for operation failure. If you open up the card, you can also see the complication/simplification chances. If you're tight on resources and time, you can't always afford to give extensive care to a heavily injured soldier. You'll have to weigh the life of one soldier vs that of the many you can save at the same time.
Check and track patient status
Soldier cards come with a status associated with them that will continue to deteriorate the longer they're denied treatment. The status types are as follows: good, stable, serious, critical, and terminal, with terminal implying that the patient is on death's door and requires immediate operation. Ideally, you want to prioritise patients and assign them earlier depending on how poor their condition is.
A neat little indicator to keep track is to watch out for the black skull when you assign a patient, as it indicates that the soldier will die before you get a chance to operate on them.
Check patient combat power
While this method means reducing these people to mere resources, on the battlefield, you don't have the luxury of empathy all the time. Each soldier comes with a level of combat power from 1 to 3, which decides how valuable they will be in terms of Combat Power, Military Drafts, or Morale once rehabilitated. You want to prioritise soldiers in a way that maximises the Combat Power you receive from saving them.
Check your Surgeon's energy
While the soldier's lives are important, an exhausted surgeon means that everyone dies. If you want to keep your morale high while also ensuring the maximum number of people are saved, you need to track your surgeon's energy. Letting them get too tired means too long of a resting period. Assign soldiers in a way that keeps the surgeon's current energy levels in mind. These energy levels are displayed on the doctor's card. You need to schedule patients with the surgeon's rest period in mind.
This is doubly important if you have a massive influx of soldiers or a filled-up Casualty Clearing Station.
Check your Medicine stocks
Medical, Chemical, and Trauma medicine are all limited resources that you need to perform operations. Sometimes, you won't have enough for everyone. At this point, you need to save patients based on the amount of resources they require to be saved.
Check patient history
The last factor to consider is one that's purely sentimental but holds a lot of meanings. The developers put in significant effort with the soldier cards and tried to ensure each soldier came with his unique backstory. If you take your time to read these, you can become rather sentimental about how you prioritise and assign soldiers, as well as whether you send them back out again or not. If you're stuck between saving two soldiers, reading their biography may help you make the difficult decision.
That's all you need to know on how to assign patients and prioritise soldiers in War Hospital. For more guides on optimisation, learn how to get more Military Drafts.