The Importance of Surgery

[StormGunner]

Surgery is an important aspect of the game by now, having evolved into letting you create your own prosthesis if necessary.
Performing surgery is not dependent on a doctor's skill level, so a level 1 doctor could theoretically happen to be the guy
installing a brand new bionic eye, which is more than likely to result in a catastrophic outcome impairing the patient and costing
the prosthesis.

It would be great to have the option of setting a minimal doctoring level for a surgery being planned, giving the player more
control over who performs it and how likely it is to fail. Moreover, it could be interesting to have the replacement organs or
prosthesis not automatically destroyed upon minor failures.

[AileTheAlien]

There's already a skill-requirements tag most of the recipe definitions for surgeries, so a cheap way to fix this, would be to set some reasonable skill level requirements, for certain surgeries. For example, installing a peg leg could be very low, and then have higher and higher skill level requirements for prosthetic, bionic, and archotech limbs. Right now (at least on the unstable branch), the skill level required to install most bionic items is 5, and a bionic heart is 8. Archotech limbs, paradoxically, have a lower skill requirement of 3, the same as prosthetic limbs. Maybe because they have some kind of easy-install technology built into them? I could live with archotech being a bit easier to install, but all of these seem a bit low for me. IMO, they could all be doubled, and I'd be fine.

[StormGunner]

Kind of missing the point here... Even if installing a peg leg requires level 3 in doctoring, I'll still
want my level 10 doctor to do it every time because of higher likelihood of success, this is the idea
behind my suggestion.
Think of your tailor benches, you want to make 10 parkas for your colonists but you don't want
normal or poor ones, you want excellent. So you set the task to be assigned to level 10 (for example)
or higher tailors. Why not use the same formula for surgeries where the impact of skill level is so
much more important?

[5thHorseman]

I'd love that. Also the drop down where you could select a specific colonist from a list of colonists ordered by (and displaying) their medical skill, like how you can assign a specific colonists to make that parka.

[Limdood]

Fair request.  Ordering bills to be done by specific colonists was just implemented.  Surgery ordered the same way seems fair.

[zgrssd]

Kind of missing the point here... Even if installing a peg leg requires level 3 in doctoring, I'll still
want my level 10 doctor to do it every time because of higher likelihood of success, this is the idea
behind my suggestion.
Think of your tailor benches, you want to make 10 parkas for your colonists but you don't want
normal or poor ones, you want excellent. So you set the task to be assigned to level 10 (for example)
or higher tailors. Why not use the same formula for surgeries where the impact of skill level is so
much more important?

I feel that "installing Bionics" happens rarely enough, that I can manually define who does it. My best doctor is always set to the highest piority as Doctor. So most of the time, he will get it anyway.

It would still be a nice addition. But not a critical one.

[StormGunner]

I feel that "installing Bionics" happens rarely enough, that I can manually define who does it.
My best doctor is always set to the highest piority as Doctor. So most of the time, he will get
it anyway.

Note that while bionics are quite rarely installed most games, there is not a single game
where I'm not replacing basic organs anywhere between 5-10 times. Having a bad doctor fail
at installing a heart and wasting it, just because I was not paying attention for a second who's
operating, is just a severe hit because most likely that means I'll have to capture a prisoner
again and suffer a colony-wide mood debuff again for harvesting his heart and killing him.
Then of course, the doc might fail again.

[syterth]

I think a check box (like self-tend), but for surgery.

Chad
Hillary
Bosco

All doctors, but only Chad gets the surgery box checked because he's great and the other two should only bandage people.