Change in funding mechanics for Career Mode

[Auriga_Nexus]

Basically, this suggestion would change the way funding is acquired and managed in Career Mode. Right now you receive a small amount of starting credits, enough to build your first rocket, but you must use funding from contracts to progress any further. This seems to me to be a bit unrealistic, especially if you consider the Kerbal Space Program to be a government-affiliated agency a la NASA.

Under alternate career mode rules, you would actually receive a "budget" from, say Kongress (or whatever "government" the Kerbals live under), at the start of the game, as well as periodically throughout the game on a "yearly" basis. This budget would be something along the lines of several million funding credits. However, that would be all the funding you would get for that year. Furthermore, the amount you receive each year differs depending on what all you accomplished during that time period. The reputation system would essentially reflect your standing with both the public and with the government on how "useful" they think the Kerbal Space Program actually is. Successful missions and scientific research would increase reputation, whereas failed launches and KIA Kerbonauts would decrease it. In addition, your reputation decreases at a fixed rate, but having active missions decreases the rate at which you lose reputation due to inactivity not unlike the "Punish the Lazy" career mode mod. Your reputation at the end of the year would determine your budget for next year - a high reputation nets you more funds to work with, while a low reputation means less funds.

This would basically make managing career mode a bit similar to an actual state-sponsored space program - sure the government gives you money but how much they're willing to part with depends on how your actions at KSP will advance Kerbal society. If you have a track record of launching uber-expensive rockets with nothing to show for it, your budget gets slashed - too many failures and they may just eliminate the space program entirely creating a career mode "game over". If anyone has ever played the X-COM games, this is basically similar to how it worked in X-COM.

Contracts, of course, would have to be modified in such a way as to make it very difficult to make a profit from a launch if you used a brand-new spacecraft to do it, while still allowing you to recuperate funds. This would make SSTO's and other reusable spacecraft much more important as they can be used for multiple missions. Building one may cost the equivalent of 3 satellite launch missions but if you can use it for 5 you can profit. See? It may also give resource extraction a use other than keeping your fuel tanks full - after all space is full of plenty of rare minerals and materials that can be of use terrestrially, and if you can bring it back to Kerbin I'm sure someone would be willing to shell out extra cash for it.

So basically, rather than starting with a measly few hundred credits and having to find ways to make a profit, you would start out with several million but have to plan carefully to manage and make the most of it. This would make things easier starting out, but make things challenging later in the game. Science and tech research would work the same way it does now, with the exception that building upgrades now actually cost science AND funding (to make it so you can't fully upgrade everything right away.) And of course, gaining science and researching tech tree nodes would increase your reputation. However, remember the shiny parts on the right side of the tech tree cost a lot more than the rusty but reliable parts on the left, and cramming a single-use rocket with the shiniest new gear may not be the most economical decision - nor will it necessarily endear you to Kongress, some of whom are just looking for a reason to slash your budget (kind of like how it works IRL with politics the way it is)

Personally I would like to see this more as a mod or optional setting as opposed to a total changeover - the current career mode has its merits and I can see pros and cons of both career mechanics. But this would be a nice way to mix things up and make repeated playthroughs more interesting.

EDIT: An honest apology, someone actually already had this idea and incorporated it into a mod: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/131233

Edited November 13, 2015 by Auriga_Nexus

[Ayylmao]

This is what I've been thinking of for a while and would love to see it happen

[Xavven]

I love this idea. I am a fan of the original Microprose X-COM games and they had a very good career system. For those who haven't played X-COM, it worked like this:

Extraterrestrial aliens are invading Earth and X-COM is a counter-alien military unit. Every month you get funding from several nations, but they adjust how much they are willing to pay based on how well you are countering the aliens. Basically, any alien activity reduces the funding the country will give you, ranging from a small penalty for a simple UFO flyover, to a huge penalty if aliens abduct people or terrorize a city. Any mission successes by X-COM in that country increases your funding, so you can actually come out ahead if you shoot down UFOs, and intercept and stop alien terror missions.

There are a couple of challenges with implementing a system like this in KSP, mainly because the game doesn't have an adversary. In X-COM, you will quickly lose the game if you don't do anything, as aliens conduct activity unopposed and your funding gets cut. But in KSP, you'd need a system to punish you for failing to keep up with something, because otherwise you could simply warp ahead 50 game years to get a billion funds and then go do whatever.

I haven't tried the StateFunding mod, but it sounds like the game could get too easy after a certain point. You get income from just having stuff in orbit. In KSP stock, there's no life support, so you could just put a bunch of stuff in LKO until your net income is positive, and then time warp for infinite funds.

Perhaps a leaky-bucket approach could work. Your income could be based on reputation, but your reputation declines on a monthly basis in a logarithmic manner -- higher losses when your rep is high, so it is hard to maintain high rep but easy to maintain low rep. Bringing in science points raises your reputation, plus you get to spend it on unlocking tree nodes. At some point your income declines to 0, and when that happens, you had better have enough in the bank to get some science points somewhere or you'll lose the game when your rep reaches the lower bar. This would add a sense of urgency to career mode, I think. There would be an actual threat to losing the game, so you'd have to perform or else. Edited November 17, 2015 by Xavven

[Red Cloud]

To be honest, I think they should tie this idea to the idea of research over time. So you get funding, and you spend funding on research (and parts).

They could even add in the ability to build factories & research labs, so you can choose whether you are producing more or researching more.

To me the career mode progression just doesn't seem right at the moment. You should start in x date (1961) and then have milestones such as "reached the moon in 1967", rather than "reached the mun on the second day".

Arguably waiting for time to pass is like watching paint dry, but then there is a time setting, and you could advance time in increments, or just like x-com hit turbo until the next even puts you back into normal time (such as monthly funding, or research completed).

I like the fact that you gain science from missions, but I think there should be another way to do it, and I don't really like the unlock groups as it still comes in big rushes of funky stuff, I'd rather see stuff come bit by bit, based on the focus of my research.

[tater]

What you'd ideally do, is to have the annual budget doled out every few weeks... However many Kerbin days this is, you'd have a button added to warp to the next fiscal week. If you found yourself out of cash, you warp to the next payout. This would instantly make time a thing, and you might take longer than 100 days to fill out most of the tech tree.

[Nuranon]

had a similiar thought a while ago...first:

This should be an addition to the current system - it makes time an actual factor which it currently isn't (ignoring ore mining and the research lab), there should be:

• Sandbox
• Science Mode
• Career Mode
• Historical Mode (or however you want to call it)

...this idea increases the difficulty by screwing you over exponantially, every failure makes it harder to recover. Now to the idea itself:

I think a yearly payment - while realistic - is a bit much, make it 100 days, meaning 4 payments per year which would be based on the performance in the last year: if you screw up in Q1 then you might compensate for that in Q2 returning to budget to normality in Q3 without totally being fucked in Q2 (after the failure) because the Q2 budget is not only based on Q1 but also on the Q2,3,4 of the year before, if you underperform (meaning time accelerate) a whole year or so you would have to come back from that by giving a good performance on a very small budget, which would return slowly to normality over 1 year.

Perhaps upgrading a building should take time (50, 100, 250 days perhaps?) and it should be disabled for the time (you could still design new rockets for example but not actually build them), this would require you to plan carefully - upgrading the Kerbalnaut building to Tier 3 should perhaps be done after the launch of a large crewed mission to Duna or so, not before. Perhaps you should get a small stream of income from archiving Milestones, a flag on Mun might give you an additional 2.000 funds every 100 days, the usual multpliers could work for this - the same could be done for kerbalnaut levels, making them even more valuable - there should be the possibility of retiring a kerbalnauts (giving you double the funds) of level 3 or above. These amounts could also vary based on your reputation.

Edited November 30, 2015 by Nuranon

[tater]

100 days is too long in KSP. Start a new career. You'll blow through at least half the tech tree in 100 days. Even 50 (a number I have suggested in the past, as it is a Minmus month) is likely too long. A munar month is about 6 days, right? 6 days is a better number. The only way for such a plan to make time meaningful is for the player to actually run out or low of funds so that they have to hit the "warp to next fiscal week" button, advancing time by X days.

[Nuranon]

While I somewhat doubt that you will go through half the tech tree in 100 days, a duna transfer needs longer (okay its true you can get pretty far only with biomes on Mun and Minmus), you have a point.

I guess that also shows the core weakness of career mode, you aren't actually simulating a career, you are doing missions, to fund more missions to get science, in order to research stuff which allows you to do more missions meaning more money and science and so on...while this grind is pretty common for games (and at least here somewhat rooted in reality) it misses the context other games usually have and you can rush through it since only transfer times limit slow your progress meaningfully (beyond the technology limitations in the beginning).

 

A Solution could be to have more Kerbin based stuff, sounding rockets - possibly starting uncrewed with a heavier focus on planes. Perhaps you should have to "train" Kerbonauts before they can actually do stuff, require Pilots to fly certain assignments before they can handle a rocket, let Scientists take meassurements & crew reports on certain areas of Kerbin - either they drive or a pilot in training flies them there, no idea though what engineers could do. This wouldn't change the gameplay too much (you get these jobs anyway) but it gives a good structure to the early game...in theory missions like that could be required a lot more: you start with only pilots who you have to train, by the time you would land teh first time on mun/minmus you are required to train your first scientist (requiring a trained pilot to fly him/her places), higher levels could also require to accomplish certain assignments like (for pilots) flying a given lander on Kerbin to a certain location without crashing it and so on.

tl;dr: give players more stuff to do, require them to do more things (which have to make sense) before taking certain steps, as I wrote this should be a sepperate mode from career - a bit closer to story mode or so.

...so perhaps every 10 days would be better than 100 - nothing against 6 but it doesn't fit with a 400 day year

[tater]

The year is 426 days (and change), right? 71 weeks of 6 days.

[Kerbart]

The main argument (aside from the fact that these game mechanics have been implemented through an extended and rigorous beta program with many adjustment steps to get where we are) against this would be that the player would simply spam the timewarp button to get a lot of funds, but I assume that funding would dry up pretty quickly if month after month no results are shown. I like the idea as career mode is currently the mindless spamming of mission after mission just to get funding (and trying to combine that with science).

While the current career mode system has improved a lot over the various 1.0 iterations and provides fun challenges (cunning planning results in getting funded and gathering science at the same time, not in the least through four very lucrative tourist contracts, but I digress) it comes down to running a lot of missions for the sake of gathering funds and scraping science together. This new system could be used for both funds and science:

• Completing contracts earns reputation. Reputation is the currency that gets you funds at the end of the month (following Tater's suggestion, 6 day months seem an excellent choice)
• Doing science earns... well, science. Science in turn is the currency that gets you research points at the end of the month which are used to unlock the science tree.

Funding and Research could be fed by some rolling average of your net gains over the last six months or so, so running into a dry spell won't kill your career instantiously.

In addition, maybe, you could have the ability to buy parts, maybe only from the science boxes that can be unlocked (e.g. if you've unlocked the tier 2 boxes you can buy tier 3 technology, but not tier 5 technology), for an exorbitant price. Twenty days into career and you really want to have that gravioly detector for that Duna probe while the fly-by window is closing rapidly? Get one for 10× the price (but get a sweet pay-off when the science rolls in).

[tater]

"Spamming the warp button" is meaningless, anyway. You can do that now to avoid the rep penalty of turning down a contract so you can get new ones. In addition, I would fund MISSIONS, not the program...

Chose "Explore the Mun," and it comes with a budget, doled out as X thousand funds every 6 days (perhaps with an initial bolus of funds to start). The time limit for "explore the Mun would then be the funding period. If it is a 1 year project, then finish it in a year, or take a substantial rep hit.

[GoSlash27]

To be fair, you don't actually *have to* grind contracts to get your program off the ground. You can unlock everything up to tech level 5 without ever taking a contract if you do it right. Or even visiting the Admin building. You don't really need funding until it's time to upgrade the facilities, and by then the contracts pay handsomely. Rescuing Kerbals is something you want to do anyway and it pays well. And of course satellite contracts are pretty OP.

All this assumes, of course, that you can engineer cheap and effective rockets and are a competent missileer. If not... yeah, it's gonna be a struggle.

Best,

-Slashy

Edited December 1, 2015 by GoSlash27

[KSK]

I had some thoughts about this a while back - this thread looks like a good place to chuck them out for discussion. Or possibly to watch them sink without a trace.  Anyway - here they are:

 

Step 1. Take off and nuke the Career game from orbit. Chuck out the science system, the kerbonaut training system and the contracts system. Hang onto some of the contracts though - we might need those. Oh yeah - and the building upgrades? They stay, subject to a major overhaul.

 

Step 2. Dig through the mound o' mods. We're going to be using Life Support, (take your pick), Final Frontier (so that our brave kerbonauts have a service record to distinguish them from hundreds of other brave kerbonauts), Kerbal Engineer Redux (or the data reporting and planning modules from Mechjeb) and most importantly, Kerbal Construction Time. Repeat after me: Kerbal. Construction. Time.

 

For those that haven't played with that particular mod, it's a gem. As the name implies, building spacecraft now takes time. But that's the least of what it does. R&D takes time. Rolling out spacecraft once constructed takes time. Refurbishing the launch pad after a launch takes time. Best of all it implements a points system whereby you can upgrade your VAB and/or SPH to speed up construction or run multiple builds in parallel. You get a similar feature for research - you can upgrade the number of research points you earn per day or, crucially, the number of research points you get from building spacecraft.

 

Roll KCT and Life Support together and there's the core game. Time now matters. That affects logistics and it adds much more urgency and tension to events. It also makes for a more integrated feeling space program, with more stuff happening in parallel. Finally, it adds a much more solid, and much more granular, set of building upgrades. When all the steps of building a spacecraft and prepping it for launch take time, then suddenly there are a load of reasons for upgrading your facilities to make those steps faster which can either supplement or replace the current upgrades. 

 

Now that missions are time critical, we need decent planning tools, hence KER or Mechjeb. Trial and error flights have a certain charm and are great in Sandbox, but have no place in a Career game.

 

The basic progression loop now becomes. Build spacecraft, earn research points for building spacecraft, use research points to research better spacecraft.

 

Doing science in space now becomes merely one way of making money. Reputation (by boldly going where no kerbal has gone before) provides a second. Building infrastructure and renting it out provides a third. Tourism provides a fourth and plays well with Infrastructure. This is KSP so launch costs are cheap and labour costs are negligible, so we can go absolutely nuts with Infrastructure. Space hotels, orbital fuel depots, comsat networks, asteroid mining, powersats in kerbosynchronous orbits. All perfectly possible with existing game mechanics. How you make your money is entirely up to you - your program can do a bit of everything or you can focus on one aspect and tweak your building upgrades and research priorities accordingly.

 

Something else to bear in mind - you build the infrastructure, do the science etc. and then try to sell it, rather than the current 'accept contract to do x' model. Demand for for each of the four routes to making money will fluctuate. You can monitor this via the Strategy Screen and plan your activities accordingly.

 

Contracts as we know them do make an occasional appearance as Events. These are largely bonus activities, such as rescue missions. Typically the player will not be penalised for failing them but will receive a substantial rep bonus for achieving them, which can of course be parlayed into extra funding.

 

Finally - kerbonaut training. Simple system - missions need a certain number of training points to be accrued before you launch. This takes time. Kerbonauts earn training points faster, the more experienced they are. Kerbonauts gain experience by having flown on previous missions, much like the current system. Ideally, a Mun mission would require more training than a LKO mission but I can't figure out a graceful way of doing that.

 

How you allocate training is up to you. One highly trained kerbonaut who does it all, or a crew of three, each less well trained but more specialised - up to you. There is no fine-graining of tasks - a level 1 scientist will get you exactly as much science as a level 5 scientist but merely take longer to train up beforehand.

[BlkBltChemie]

On 11/30/2015, 1:04:03, tater said:

"Spamming the warp button" is meaningless, anyway. You can do that now to avoid the rep penalty of turning down a contract so you can get new ones. In addition, I would fund MISSIONS, not the program...

Chose "Explore the Mun," and it comes with a budget, doled out as X thousand funds every 6 days (perhaps with an initial bolus of funds to start). The time limit for "explore the Mun would then be the funding period. If it is a 1 year project, then finish it in a year, or take a substantial rep hit.

I really like the idea of a budgeted financial system as discussed here and elsewhere, but this is the first time I've seen a suggestion for the budget being tied to a specific mission.  Personally I think it is a fantastic idea, and it seems like a good compromise between having contract only funding versus a full-on time-based system with a periodic program budget.