Clinic & spa updates

1. Significantly upgrade the clinic to include a mechanic for direct, side-effect-free reduction of short-term damage, if either the player or the Nurse has any amount of skill, under the justification that short-term damage usually represents direct injury and a modern medical facility should be able to set bones, stitch wounds, perform reconstructive surgery, etc. Nurse bonuses strongly affect this new mechanic, so it fixes #1293 (closed). The short-term damage healing, coupled with the earlier changes to make the clinic not exhaust or kill slaves, should actually mean that assigning a slave to the clinic will generally make their combined health number go up, so the player can see he's actually making progress at fixing things. I consider this a huge improvement over the current state of affairs, in which four numbers you can't see change unpredictably until the slave either gets better or dies.
2. Moderate the buff to chem purge. Current code drops from 990 to 0 in two weeks flat if you have the full purge upgrade; this will change it to drop from 990 to 50 in four weeks, and taper off from there. It's still much faster than before the health revamp, just not "ignore the mechanic" crazy anymore (and it will threaten the slave's health for longer, which acts to "soak" the direct short-term damage healing for slaves who are also purging).
3. Add the usual facility anti-death condition improvement to the spa too, since condition can now drop while a slave is assigned there, due to damage conversion.
4. Add a small amount of flat, no-upgrade-required condition improvement to the spa as well, since the intent seems to be that the spa should be used to improve condition, and subtract approximately that amount from the anti-death condition improvement. The net result of this is that slaves in generally good (positive) combined health will improve fastest in the spa, while those in generally poor (negative) combined health will improve fastest in the clinic.
5. Adjust the nurseEffectiveness function to correctly consider nurses who have appropriate career backgrounds as master-skilled, since they are unable to gain nursing XP and their actual nurse skill stat is therefore stuck at 0. This means that trained nurses actually make a difference for illness prevention too.

Worth noting, this does nothing with long-term damage. My current opinion is that long-term damage is just a permanent and mostly invisible handicap to the player's ability to control his game, which adds no flavor benefit in compensation, and it should be removed entirely, so I'm not going to try to fix anything with it.

added 1 commit

• 5ca38300 - Weaken purging damage a bit more, since it'll persist for longer and the slave...

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@svornost

Biggest use I see of long-term damage is to steadily chip away at max lifespan, but too much influences it for that to work currently.

@svornost

Talk to me about the chem change, particular about the tapering off part. Body purist wants it all gone, so slowing down towards the end is going to upset things with that. The third? tier upgrade for purging chem was intended to be very fast.

@Pregmodder this is basically returning it to the old state (though it still goes twice as fast). It used to stop if it was under 50, and reduce by 50...so an incubated slave that started at 990 would drop to 40 by purge, and then the rest of the way by filter (5 per week with no health damage). If the intent is for purge to drop to zero, I can easily get rid of the tailing-off effect.

Edit: or we could up the filter speed a bit. 5/wk is almost unnoticable (one visible point every other week)...feedback to the player would improve significantly at 10/wk.

Edit2: or I misread the old code and it didn't stop until it hit 10, and Jones added the "5" not the "1" to make it 150. Crap. I'll go let it drop to 0.

@Pregmodder I think long-term damage is the wrong tool for that, and susceptibility to illness by age (plus random death chance by age to account for things like stroke/cardiac failure, which happen to otherwise-healthy people) would work just as well. And I think most arcologies still run default retirement age, so lifespan really shouldn't have any effect at all on them (historically, chattel-slave life expectancy was only a few years lower than freeman life expectancy...36 slave vs 41 free in the early 19th century US, for example, and most of that was due to infant mortality).

added 1 commit

• 50e7f1ab - Turns out purge *can* get the last little bit.

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I was mostly just considering letting .chem affect it primarily as the life shorterner.

mentioned in commit 6f935d52

merged