War Hospital: Beginner Guide

War Hospital puts you in charge of treating soldiers pulled from the trenches of the First World War. With only a small team of overworked but dedicated medics, nurses, and doctors, you need to save as many lives as possible while maintaining the well-bveing and morale of your staff.

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Managing the game's minutiae can be a real balancing act, and first-time players might find the nearby cemetery filling up fast. Here's everything you need to know about running a successful hospital, along with some tips for saving more patients than you lose.

Casualty Clearing Station

The building that you're likely to visit the most is the Casualty Clearing Station, located between the Operating Ward and the Cemetery. This is where patients are assigned to doctors for treatment. A patient's condition will deteriorate over time, and if they aren't treated they will eventually die.

Patients can still be brought to the Casualty Clearing Station even if there aren't enough beds. Patients who don't have a bed cannot be treated by nurses and will deteriorate faster as a result.

To assign a patient to a doctor, drag their card into that doctor's queue. Doctors will treat patients one at a time, in order from left to right on their queue. Use the information on the patients' cards to decide on the order in which they should be treated.

Once you've researched Amputation Tools and Oxygen Inhalation, you can use them to speed up Surgery and Chemical procedures, respectively. Right-clicking a patient's card in the CCS will mark or unmark them for Amputation or Oxygen. These procedures cost half the normal resources and are twice as fast, but the patient must be released from military service at the end of their rehabilitation.

Patient Card Stats

Stat

Effect

Condition

• Indicates how close to dying the patient is.
• Degrades in the following order: Good, Stable, Serious, Critical, Terminal.
• If a patient in the queue is expected to die before they can receive treatment, a black skull icon will appear on their card. Try changing the order of treatment to get them to a doctor faster!

Diagnosis

• The color of the stamp indicates the type of injury.
  • Red represents bullets and shrapnel wounds that require surgery.
  • Blue represents psychological trauma that requires therapy.
  • Green represents chemical burns inflicted by gas warfare, that must be treated in a specialized ward.
• The number of downward arrows next to the icon indicates the rate at which the patient's condition will decline; the more arrows, the less time they have.

Operation Cost

• Indicates how many resources will be required to treat the patient.
• If a doctor doesn't have access to enough supplies to treat the next patient in their queue, the entire queue stops until the situation changes.

Combat Power

• The red arrows next to the soldier's portrait indicate how useful he'll be in the trenches if he recovers.
• Sending skilled soldiers to the trenches helps defend the hospital from enemy attacks(see Rehabilitation, below).

Operation Time

• The number next to the hourglass is an estimate of how long it will take to treat the patient once they're brought to a doctor.
• Operations can be extended or shortened by events or by the skill of the assigned doctor.

Operation Difficulty

• The stars next to the lightning bolt indicates how much stamina the doctor will use to treat the patient.
• The more stars, the faster the doctor will tire. Long operations with a high difficulty rating will likely exhaust the doctor and require him to rest afterward.

Operation Risk

• The stars next to the scales indicate how likely the patient is to survive.
• The more stars, the more likely it is that the patient will die during treatment.
• A skilled doctor can still save high-risk patients, but if you're forced to choose it's better to send the patient with better survival odds for treatment,.

If you don't believe a patient can be saved, or if you don't have enough resources or manpower and can't treat everyone, you can move one or more patients to the Denied folder at the bottom-right corner of the screen. Patients in the Denied folder will not be treated by nurses and their condition will rapidly decline. You can take a patient back out of the Denied folder at any time.

The hospital always suffers a loss of Morale when a patient dies, but the penalty is smallest for Denied patients.

Operating Ward

The Operating Ward is the large converted church at the center of the hospital map. This is where patients are taken to be seen by doctors. At the beginning of the game, only the Surgery Wing, where patients with a red diagnosis icon are treated, is available. You'll have to build Trauma and Chemical wings in order to successfully treat other patients.

The first doctor you hire for each specialization is free, but will still take a few hours to arrive by train.

Medics assigned to the Casualty Clearing Station will bring patients to the Operating Ward, and then to the Rehabilitation Center once the procedure is complete. If a patient dies during their treatment, medics assigned to the Cemetery will remove their bodies for burial. If no medics are currently working,then no patients will be moved!

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Occasionally, an exclamation mark will appear over the Operating Ward and over the icon of a patient currently under operation. This means that a Simplification or Complication has arisen in their procedure that requires you to make a decision. Progress on their treatment will stop until you make a decision, but the operating doctor will continue to lose stamina, so be sure to resolve these as soon as they happen.

Patients that die in the Operating Ward or the Casualty Clearing Station will continue to take up a bed until they're removed by Medics, unless you have the Morgue upgrade.

Rehabilitation Center

If a patient's treatment is successful, they'll be brought to the Rehabilitation Center. They'll stay there for a length of time determined by the severity of their initial injury and the invasiveness of their treatment. The number and skill of attending nurses can reduce this time. When a patient's rehab timer reaches zero, you can discharge them from the hospital.

Patients will only make progress toward rehabilitation while one or more nurses are on duty at the rehab center; if no nurses are present, all patients' countdowns stop.

Placing a patient's card in the files on the desk determines where they'll be sentupon discharge:

• Sending a soldier to the Trenches adds their Combat Power to the 36th Infantry during the next enemy attack. The more Combat Power they have, the fewer and less dire the injuries from that battle will be.
• Sending a soldier back to HQ earns you one to three Military Drafts that can be used to requisition supplies from the Train Station or build Improvements with your engineers.
• Releasing a soldier from military service sends them home - alive, but not necessarily in one piece. Doing so slightly increases the Morale of hospital staff.

Most of the soldiers you discharge will be sent to the Trenches or to HQ. As a patient heals, they may gain more Combat Powerthan was initially indicated on their card. Chevrons outlined in red rather than black have a potential to refill during the soldier's rehabilitation; it might be worth keeping them in the Pending file and making a final decision when they're fully recovered.

If the Trenches don't have enough soldiers to repel an enemy attack (i.e., the battle icon on the timeline is red), then the defensive line will be overrun and the hospital forced to evacuate, causing a game over.

Advance Dressing Station

Whenever a battle occurs in the Trenches, several soldiers will require medical attention - usually dozens at a time. Once built, the Advance Dressing Station allows assigned medics to enter the Trenches and pull out the wounded. Wounded soldiers remain at the Advance Dressing Station until another medic comes to pick them up and bring them to CCS. It's located well north of the main area, so medics take extra time to travel there!

Patients at the ADS don't have access to nurse treatment and will worsen over time. There isn't anything you can do for them until they reach the Casualty Clearing Station, so try to clear all your queues as quickly as possible!

Mastering the flow of patients from one building to another while managing your staff's workload is the key to success in War Hospital!

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