Using World Firsts to enable time-based mechanics

[Pthigrivi]

Injecting time as a meaningful factor into KSP has been discussed a lot on this board. The main thing that makes it difficult is time warp. You can add things like construction time, research time, long term experiments and the like but if players can just time warp through it you're really not actually creating a challenge, you're making them press the period button. You can discourage this kind of thing by adding a cost to time--salaries and reputation that whittles away over time etc--but then you end up penalizing players for time warping when they really need to.

I think Roverdude had the right idea when he started working on the telemetry system. If players are going to be asked to do more legwork (setting up arrays in that instance) then the benefits should be purely bonus rewards, not penalties. I think a similar idea could help create a clever incentive process for players to consider time more carefully. The simple version is that World Firsts could become a bonus reward system with global deadlines--that is, hard dates set from the outset of your career rather than by the date a contract was accepted. Milestones would stay the way they are, passive rewards for progress that neither have advances nor deadlines; Explore Contracts would be the central tree through which players explore deeper into the Kerbol system; and World Firsts would be rewards for getting places fast. The best way to do this and make it obvious to players might be to fold them into the Explore contracts themselves as bonus deadlines. When you viewed the Explore contract you would see:

Prestige: Trivial

Expires: 5d, 3h, 22m

Deadline: 100d

Objective: Achieve orbit around Minmus

Rewards: 

Advance : 40,000f

Completion: 110,000f, 12s, 10r

Failure: -45,000

World First!

Deadline: 50d

Reward: 25,000f, 15s, 15r

 

Its not just that you got there, its that you were the first to get there. Players could think of these as a kind of space race or beating commercial competitors or whatever they liked. Its not about forcing a particular kind of role playing, its just about rewarding players for cleverly managing time. This is still tricky though. You would have to carefully calibrate them based on transfer windows and flight durations, and for "Return from" contracts return windows and return durations. These could be set for ideal windows on Normal difficulty, but could also be set tighter for harder difficulty levels giving a real challenge beyond grinding harder for building upgrades. Just for reference these are some ideal transfer windows and the World First dates they would imply:

Duna - window: Year 1, day 236 + 258 days en route = world first date: Year 2, day 68

Moho - window: Year 1, day 269 + 137 days en route = world first date: Year 1, day 406

Dres - window: Year 1, day 341+ 1 year 157 days en route = world first date: Year 3, day 72

Eve - window: Year 2, day 160 + 197 days en route = world first date: Year 2, day 357

Jool - window: Year 2, day 250 + 3 years 267 days en route = world first date: Year 5, day 91

Eeloo - window: Year 2, day 256 + 4 years 189 days en route = world first date: Year 6, day 19

 

Of course you could easily sneak in with probes earlier than these dates to do some scouting and scoop some rewards, or do any number of missions closer to Kerbin to make money in the mean time, but this at least sets a basic time scale for how long missions aught to take as you progress. Once this was in place all of a sudden players would have to weigh more carefully the idea of strategically time warping through rocket or building construction or long-term experiments because when it comes to beating these overarching deadlines the clock's a tickin. 

Anyway, just a thought

 

Edited September 26, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[Wjolcz]

So instead of "Your first!" it becomes more of a "You've come here fast!" type of thing?

I don't feel like the world's first should be repurposed that way. I, for example like to explore the solar system at my own pace. Not having rewards for being slow kind of feels like a punishment tbh.

I always liked the idea of mission types' progression though. World's first could repurposed as scouting missions. So if you wanted to explore a body you would have a clear progression of: World's Firsts AKA Scouting Missions (get there for the sake of it), then Scientific Missions (get there and gather science) and after that Commercial Missions (get there and get paid for doing so).

I don't really like the idea of a competetive space program, simply because there's none. All these capsules with rescue contracts pop out out of nowhere like quantum particles. Not saying it wouldn't be cool to have another agency sending things into space, but that's unlikely to happen.

Edited September 25, 2016 by Veeltch

[Alshain]

So, if I'm understanding this... in a nutshell,

The milestones (and resulting payout) are the reward for accompling a task, and the explore contracts payout are the reward for accomplishing it on time?

 

[pandaman]

Whilst I am very much in favour of time based mechanics I'm not sure this on its own is a solution.

I don't want to derail the thread by going off at tangents, I'll try and put my (currently a work in progress) thoughts together and post them separately, but one thing that always comes to my mind when 'but you can just timewarp' is mentioned is simply that time still passes, it just passes faster.  With multiple missions going on simultaneously you only want to warp to the next 'event' which is not necessarily until your current task is completed. So for this to be a viable gameplay option something like KAC needs to be integrated into stock.

[Pthigrivi]

8 hours ago, Veeltch said:

I don't feel like the world's first should be repurposed that way. I, for example like to explore the solar system at my own pace. Not having rewards for being slow kind of feels like a punishment tbh.

...

I don't really like the idea of a competetive space program, simply because there's none. All these capsules with rescue contracts pop out out of nowhere like quantum particles. Not saying it wouldn't be cool to have another agency sending things into space, but that's unlikely to happen.

 

8 hours ago, Alshain said:

So, if I'm understanding this... in a nutshell,

The milestones (and resulting payout) are the reward for accompling a task, and the explore contracts payout are the reward for accomplishing it on time?

 

 

Right, so actually very little changes from how things are in 1.2 right now. Say you want to go to Minmus. Once the "Flyby Minmus" Explore contract pops up you can accept that contract and receive an advance for going there. If you're ambitious you can plow right ahead to orbit or land with the same mission, and you'll still receive the reward for those tasks because they now count as Milestones and pay out automatically (ie, what used to be World Firsts are all now Milestones). Once you've landed a "Plant Flag" Explore contract should pop up and you can continue on from there. World Firsts would become a component of these contracts, a bonus reward for completing the task of landing on Minmus before a specific date. 

So basically your rewards would look like this:

Reward for Landing on Minmus either as an Explore contract or as a Milestone: 100% of the funds you recieve now

Extra reward for Landing on Minmus before Year 1 day 50: an extra 25% of the funds you receive now

 

There's no need to have other npc ships out there, they're just bonus dates listed in the Explore contracts. You could think of them as a space-race if you liked or an internal deadline or John F Kerman saying "We will go to Minmus by this date" or whatever you choose. Its just an incentive process to speed things up if you wanted a little extra. 

Edited September 25, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[Wjolcz]

Well, yeah, I guess it's not a bad idea, but I'd still rather have a contract creator with sliders. Would work the same exact way, except you wouldn't have to pray to the gods of randomness and fish out the ones based around Minmus (or some other body). You would just select Minmus as a target, pick the biome, science experiments/objectives you want to perform there and set the contract expiry date with a slider. Give yourself more time - the rewards ain't that good. Lower the expiry date and the rewards go sky high.

Bonuses for getting somewhere faster is something I'm OK with, but I'd like to set them and the objectives myself.

Edited September 25, 2016 by Veeltch

[Pthigrivi]

2 hours ago, Veeltch said:

Well, yeah, I guess it's not a bad idea, but I'd still rather have a contract creator with sliders. Would work the same exact way, except you wouldn't have to pray to the gods of randomness and fish out the ones based around Minmus.

So I don't know if you've been messing around with the 1.2 pre-release but one of the really big developments in the most recent build is Explore contracts now automatically pop up, so no more sitting around waiting for them. They're maybe a little too linear at the moment for my taste, but its still great to always have at least one available (thanks @Arsonide!) If things were broken into a simple tree with Explore contracts for the Mun and Minmus popping up after you reached orbit and Explore contracts for the planets opening up after you'd landed on both moons you'd have the beginnings of what you're looking for--a more or less open slate of options to chose from as you progressed.

The expiry date slider is interesting though. It would take some balancing but definitely could work. I was just trying to keep things simple so whether you accepted the Explore contract or just went out and did it on your own it you'd still get that bump for beating the World First date.

Edit: I fixed the example in the OP, the default pass/fail date for Explore contracts should always be more forgiving than the World First date. I can see why that caused confusion. 

Edited September 25, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[tater]

I like the idea of presenting players---particularly new players with things like decent launch windows, but I don't see how this makes time meaningful.

Given that you can unlock the tech tree long before even the first Duna transfer window, how does this spread things out? I'm of the opposite view WRT time warp. I think it's a good thing, and should in fact be encouraged so that days pass.

[Wjolcz]

@tater is right. Time based mechanics can't be solved by simply adding higher rewards for completing a contract quicker. IMO the best way to introduce time-based mechanics is to make the tech take time to unlock.

Career really needs to change. More tweaks to the system won't make it any better. It just needs to change.

Edited September 26, 2016 by Veeltch

[Pthigrivi]

4 hours ago, tater said:

I like the idea of presenting players---particularly new players with things like decent launch windows, but I don't see how this makes time meaningful.

Given that you can unlock the tech tree long before even the first Duna transfer window, how does this spread things out? I'm of the opposite view WRT time warp. I think it's a good thing, and should in fact be encouraged so that days pass.

Well first I wouldn't presume that completing the tech tree is synonymous with beating the game, though you'd be forgiven for thinking that given the way things are presented. And of course, this in and of itself would not spread things out--that would be the function of other mechanics like making research and construction take time. What this could do is provide a simple back-pressure for those things. It makes those mechanics meaningful instead of something players automatically time-warp through without having to think at all about it. Its not just about watching the calendar number change so people feel satisfied with their role playing, its about creating real incentives and making time a genuine game resource with real trade-offs. With World First dates players would at times have to chose between time-warping through a given build or research node or collecting more science from a long-term experiment and risking missing a World First date and potentially an extra 25% of the funds and reputation they could yield. It doesn't fall into some of the pitfalls of giving time a direct cost in terms of money or reputation bleeding away because each deadline is specifically calibrated to the transfer window and duration of the flight. 

Edited September 26, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[Wjolcz]

46 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

With World First dates players would at times have to chose between time-warping through a given build or research node or collecting more science from a long-term experiment and risking missing a World First date and potentially an extra 25% of the funds and reputation they could yield.

I think I'm having trouble understanding this part. So the World's Firsts aren't the only time-based mechanic here? The nodes also take time to research and vessels take time to build?

Edited September 26, 2016 by Veeltch

[Pthigrivi]

40 minutes ago, Veeltch said:

I think I'm having trouble understanding this part. So the World's Firsts aren't the only time-based mechanic here? The nodes also take time to research and vessels take time to build?

Yeah they certainly could, (and should really). This post was particular to the problem of adding a light and manageable cost to time so that those other mechanics could work properly. It also identifies the kind of scale were dealing with in terms of transfer windows and flight times that these other mechanics could be calibrated to. For instance if you thought the nuke engine should unlock in time for a moho mission you could set the research times to end roughly around its first transfer window. 

Edited September 26, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[tater]

2 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Well first I wouldn't presume that completing the tech tree is synonymous with beating the game, though you'd be forgiven for thinking that given the way things are presented. And of course, this in and of itself would not spread things out--that would be the function of other mechanics like making research and construction take time. What this could do is provide a simple back-pressure for those things. It makes those mechanics meaningful instead of something players automatically time-warp through without having to think at all about it. Its not just about watching the calendar number change so people feel satisfied with their role playing, its about creating real incentives and making time a genuine game resource with real trade-offs. With World First dates players would at times have to chose between time-warping through a given build or research node or collecting more science from a long-term experiment and risking missing a World First date and potentially an extra 25% of the funds and reputation they could yield. It doesn't fall into some of the pitfalls of giving time a direct cost in terms of money or reputation bleeding away because each deadline is specifically calibrated to the transfer window and duration of the flight. 

I use the time to unlock even the fantasy spaceplane parts as a metric of how rapidly people can accomplish virtually anything in the game. Once parts (and funds) are not an issue, you can literally go anywhere, easily.

The time limits on world firsts are good, I like any "race" sensibility, but if the player can go anywhere by day 200, what difference does it make to set dates after that, and setting any before... you're already going to the Mun literally a couple days after inventing spaceflight. Stuff needs to be slowed or stretched out in time.

[Pthigrivi]

So yeah lets talk about that. Even the dates I listed above start when you go interplanetary, which could easily put you at least halfway through the tech tree. In the early game as you're tackling the Mun and Minmus and maybe an asteroid or two the timings are a lot more flexible. You can easily go Orbital the first day, and a round trip to the Mun takes less than 3. Minmus is a 20 day round trip, but asteroids could take over 250 days. The question is if we're talking about something like time-based R+D how could that be calibrated to put pressure on that first Duna window on day 236? How are we challenging players to build up enough tech or just cowboy it? Lets say for the sake of argument you'd want half of the tier 6 nodes and if you're lucky a couple of tier 7s like Nuclear Propulsion and Electronics before that point. To keep things simple lets also say you can research any number of nodes at one time (though maybe this could be a product of building upgrades). You could almost make it so each tier takes 7 more days than the one before it, so tier 1 takes 7 days, tier 2 takes 14 days, tier 3 21 days etc. Based on my own career so far that would have me in orbit by day 42, sending mun probes and doing other contracts until day 84, and sending crewed missions to the Mun, Minmus, and setting up my station and satellite networks until day 185 or so. If you factored in a 30 day science building upgrade that would get pretty close to your first set of Interplanetary windows. Just to throw some numbers out, that would set these as forgiving enough World Firsts for Normal difficulty:

Escape the Atmosphere: Day 15

Reach Orbit: Day 45

Flyby the Mun: Day 70

Oribit the Mun: Day 80

Land on the Mun: Day 100

Plant Flag on the Mun: Day 150

Flyby Minmus: Day 90

Orbit Minmus: Day 120

Land on Minmus: Day 150

Plant Flag on Minmus: Day 180

Intercept an Asteroid: Day 300

 

All of this could be adjusted of course to account for rocket construction time and other building upgrades. The main point is once you have these fixed dates to beat all of the other time-based components of the game take on urgency and force players to carefully plan. Sometimes they might want to forgo time-warping through a given upgrade so that they can make other missions happen and keep the ball rolling in the meantime, not just because they were bored or wanted to role play but because it makes strategic sense. They'd have to think about whether to rush out the door with less tech than they'd prefer to get the World First or wait and maybe earn better experiments so they could get more science when they got there.

Edited September 27, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[tater]

In real play:

Reach orbit: Kerbin hour 2? (is that too late? It might literally be minutes.)

Reach the Mun? 70 days? The trip is more than 70 minutes, so the lower boundary value is higher... hours are not impossible, a few days into career at most.

I'm not seeing any "time" being created.

[Pthigrivi]

44 minutes ago, tater said:

I'm not seeing any "time" being created.

So whats going on is you're flying a mission, collecting science, then starting your R+D upgrades which each take a few weeks depending on how advanced the upgrade is. For the most part early on you're going to want to time-warp through those nodes because you really will want that heat shield to re-enter after going orbital. Over time that R+D process adds up, pushing you closer to those World First dates and forcing players to make decisions about what they really need to get where they're going. Things like rocket construction and long-term experiments could also take time, but without some kind of goal and reward that time doesn't mean anything. Thats what World First dates can provide.

Edited September 27, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[tater]

Ah, well time-based R&D is the only thing that's adding time as a thing. More sensible deadlines would be awesome, don't get me wrong, but without something that actually adds time as a thing, the declines are meaningless. World firsts don't add time as a thing at all that I see.

R&D taking time would help a lot, but again, that leads to the perfectly fine use of time warp.

I would have R&D take time (funds and science might be currency to speed it up).

I would add life support.

Then the contracts can all have sensible time limits.

[Pthigrivi]

35 minutes ago, tater said:

Ah, well time-based R&D is the only thing that's adding time as a thing. More sensible deadlines would be awesome, don't get me wrong, but without something that actually adds time as a thing, the declines are meaningless. World firsts don't add time as a thing at all that I see.

You need both. There are a ton of different time-consuming mechanics that are possible--mining, long-term experiments, KCT etc. This thread isn't really about those elements individually, its about how to make them meaningful. Without some kind of deadline pressure to restrain these things there's no reason not to time-warp through any of them. Setting tighter failure deadlines doesn't actually accomplish this because they are set by the date you accept the contract, not by a global clock. If you can set your own deadlines then those deadlines don't actually matter very much, you can just time-warp through all your research and then accept the contract without having to think about anything. You've added more clicking and maybe a bit of role playing but you haven't actually added gameplay. Gameplay requires strategy and trade-offs, having to consider whether to time warp through a research node or whether you would gain more by running a riskier mission without those parts. If you never have to think about it because its always better to time-warp then you've done a lot of work and added very little to the game.

You could of course set the Explore contract deadlines by a global clock rather than by the date those contracts were accepted, but that seems a little harsh, and leads to a situation in which missing a deadline to go to Duna means there will never be a reason to go to Duna. Setting them as a small bonus creates an incentive to think about time without causing major disruption to the rest of the game. 

Edited September 27, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[tater]

Time warping is FINE, and should be encouraged in career. It has no downside, it makes time progress, as it should without the player having to be bored.

I agree that there then needs to be a reason not to time warp at some level, but really budget would constrain this alone, if budget were a thing. It could be via fixed costs per unit time associated with facilities (buy-in might be lowered for upgrades, but there would then be some annual overhead forever). It could be via a requirement to have a certain number of flights per year or face a rep penalty (which would impact future contracts, etc). Its all intertwined, obviously, but you are correct that there needs to be incentives and disincentives from multiple directions.

[Pthigrivi]

Well, we've been over some of these before but the trouble with budgets and with scheduled reputation hits is they aren't scalable. They happen evenly over time regardless of what the player is doing. This means players are penalized for time-warping in general rather than based the time-scale of the task at hand. Time based budgets place strong economic biases toward short-term vs long-term missions, and requiring a certain number of missions per year also encourages players to bang out a few easy missions just to make the quota. The advantage to bonus deadlines is they can be precisely calibrated to specific tasks. Both the deadline is shorter and the bonus is smaller for a Mun Mission than for a Jool mission, which matters a lot. Its what allows you to scale rewards based both on the duration and the difficulty of the mission. They are also bound to headline missions that players will be doing anyway, which means they aren't placing pressure to do filler missions. 

[tater]

I don't disagree, actually, it's complex to be sure. 

[Rodhern]

@Pthigrivi, we have science points, reputation points and funds, but we can make up new kinds of points if we think it will be fun. For instance discovery progress points. You could for instance get discovery progress points for World First accomplishments, (certain) Science reports, Kerbals leveling up, significant number of contracts completed, SOI visits, all of the milestones you listed and so on. That will let you put hard time limits on when you must have your first 10 progress points, when must you have 50 points, 200 points, and so on. There is even a bit of wiggle room there to adjust/tighten the deadlines if you race through several of the early ones ahead of time. The important part is that you get a lot of freedom in how you want to achieve 'progress'. All of that you can already do on a 'pen and paper' basis today (and maybe a plugin to help you ease the bookkeeping). Would discovery progress points help you feel a meaningful time factor?

[Wjolcz]

15 hours ago, Rodhern said:

@Pthigrivi, we have science points, reputation points and funds, but we can make up new kinds of points if we think it will be fun. For instance discovery progress points. You could for instance get discovery progress points for World First accomplishments, (certain) Science reports, Kerbals leveling up, significant number of contracts completed, SOI visits, all of the milestones you listed and so on. That will let you put hard time limits on when you must have your first 10 progress points, when must you have 50 points, 200 points, and so on. There is even a bit of wiggle room there to adjust/tighten the deadlines if you race through several of the early ones ahead of time. The important part is that you get a lot of freedom in how you want to achieve 'progress'. All of that you can already do on a 'pen and paper' basis today (and maybe a plugin to help you ease the bookkeeping). Would discovery progress points help you feel a meaningful time factor?

Noooooooooooooooooo. No more types of points. I already have to deal with science points, which this game could be perfectly fine without (if only devs planmed the career properly in the first place).

More types of currencies = more useless stuff that clutter the UI. Science points become obsolete once you finish the tech. And so would probably these "exploration points". There's also the problem with balancing them. I really don't see how a new currency would help implementing time-based mechanics.

[Superfluous J]

21 minutes ago, Veeltch said:

I really don't see how a new currency would help implementing time-based mechanics.

Well duh. We could add time points.

j/k.

[Pthigrivi]

Well I think what Rodhern means are kind of like victory points that measure your overall progress through the game, which is interesting--I do think the game is missing a kind of overarching goal that supersedes the tech-tree--but in general here I'm hoping for a system thats as simple and clean as it can possibly be as Tater is quite right the problem is actually surprisingly complicated.