Master39

Context. They were accusing me of blindly defending the Devs on something that has been my stance on the matter for years. It may be a hill I'm ready to die on, but sure enough it's not a new one, by a long margin. You don't like multiplayer, fine, I'm not going to use that to deduce you must hate the Devs.

Why force yourself to play a game you're not enjoying? Really, the game will either get better or it won't, regardless of how much attention you give to it or to the arguments around it. A watched pot never boils, there's no need to bore yourself to death.

Speaking of rationality, I think this is telling if anyone wants to get an idea of how much effort there is behind your (stil valid) opinion. Unless you invent actual time travel, you either have an asynchronous system with independent time-warp or a synchronous one with everyone at the same level of warp at all times*. The former allows for the latter (you can simply choose to always be in sync), so it's intrinsically a better option. There's no other way. And no, this isn't me defending the Devs, I've been saying this for years now. Why I get the feeling that, if I worded my opinion as "I miss the good old times in which every game had a couch co-op split screen mode, not the online crap we get today" the reply would have been different? Fun thing, this sounds a lot like you agree with me on the state of this forum. *Yes, I know you can make something else be asynchronous, planets, bubbles or whatever, the point is that something has to be out of sync if you want time-warp.

Are you saying you don't want multiplayer? Good for you, I have multiple people ready to pull the trigger as soon as it releases. But for many, many, people multiplayer is kinda important, and saying that is not "defending the project management" but I get why you say so, this kind of black and white BS atmosphere is kinda the reason of my hiatus from the forums, I'll probably be back after the whole place has recovered from this wave of polarization and toxicity, right now this isn't exactly a healthy place to be in. I love messing around with robotics, much less so assembling engines from parts, and I think at least some pre-assembled propelled engines would be welcomed by most.

Occasional 1 mission, 1 flight saves, not much more, the game can't sustain any kind of infrastructure building right now.

"Everything multiplayer sucks, and it's a waste of resources" is the definition of "Single player elitism". You may want to go back to 3 years of multiplayer discussions, nothing new here, I think I've written at least a hundred times that every game is better with co-op. I have a very specific play-style I like for my personal sandbox save (Yep, because I'm still not a fan of EA, I just think KSP2 can replace KSP1 sandbox in a patch or two and that's worth the price for me), and for that I need to be able to recover my kerbals, a bug that apparently is going to be fixed in patch 2. Right now I'm just firing up the game occasionally for a single-mission session, something which is fun but not enough to hook me up to the game. A multiplayer mode right now would definitely make me ignore the bugs to play with friends. In hindsight I think I should have put "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" in my signature given that, apparently, I didn't repeat it often enough if that's what you got by my general "let's keep expectation grounded, in both directions" attitude. I spent just as much time shooting down people building unrealistic expectations, but I guess that doesn't matter, right? More or less the thing was to try to keep it grounded, there was a lot of "They haven't shown X so X doesn't exist" and "They haven't shown X so X must be this super-secret AAA level feature that they're keeping as a surprise" going on in the years leading up to launch. Personally, I was definitely expecting the game to be a bit better, but not by much, maybe patch 1 or 2 levels of "a bit better", but I've also learned not to expect anything other than a buggy mess from EA games on D1. The game is still following the script. Back in topic, rotor and propeller engine should absolutely be a pre-assembled engine category and not part of robotics, we don't assemble rocket engines from parts, why should we do that for propellers? This is a rocket game and yet I don't have to choose the right type of pumps for my rocket engine, why should I have to pick the number of blades and their pitch for an helicopter tail rotor? The amount of detail for prop engines in KSP1 doesn't make sense given the context of the game and, IMHO, has kept rotor crafts and propellers more niche that they could be.

Like it or not, but MP is a sought after feature mostly by players. If it wasn't a multiplier for sales they wouldn't get through the hassle of programming it into the game. Right now, bugs and problems considered, is the main reason I'm playing yet another modded Minecraft run and not KSP-2, as I can't play it together with my friends (and most of them aren't probably going to buy the game until after MP is a thing). Single player elitism never ceased to amaze me.

I think this poll lacks a middle way between optimistic and disappointed. KSP in general is my favorite game, but KSP2 is only one of at least a dozen early access games I own on Steam (Steam tells me it's 38 games with that tag, but I don't know how accurate the tag is), some where better and more polished than KSP2 when I first bought them (Dyson Sphere Program and Timberborn are notable examples) some where worse (looking at you Stationeers) some of them evolved in directions I didn't like (Juno/SR2, Simple plane and its paid VR update, or Satisfactory), a few I forgot about (Balsa Model Flight Sim? How is that game going these days?), and a whole lot went on to release as full 1.0 games (Hardspace: Shipbreaker, Minecraft, Factorio, Terraria, VTOL VR...). I'm waiting for an update, when the update drops I'll test it out and see if it's still a game to mess around with for 15 minutes (now that 10 of those minutes aren't taken by the loading screen) or a game to get addicted with and spend hundreds of hours on. KSP2 isn't there yet. I know it's been said over and over around here, but this is Early Access, and for me that means I'm going to wait for an update, test the differences, and see if the game is ready yet for a longer run, rinse and repeat with the next update if it's not. It's an healthier mindset than just waiting for a release date that's months away.

Steam (and Epic too, I think) leave the DRM choice to the dev. Whether you buy it on Epic, Steam, or the website the license agreement is going to be the same, as the DRM if they choose to include one.

I vote for garlic too, now it's a known fact in the community and you are not listening to our feedback about it.

First, I'm talking uniquely about KSP2 here, KSP1 was mostly a accident for how everything works. They could have gone with an entirely rigid model, or implement the KJR workaround as the default, instead they went for flexible joints and made a video specifically showcasing them, pointing it out in early interviews. Like it or not but the presence of flexible joints in KSP2 is a choice.

Oh, yeah, I was just using yours as an example, and a great one at that. Honestly I didn't go as far as thinking about the wobbling of boosters messing with the direction of thrust before reading your comment.

3:57 Nate Sympson: There is this sort of... ehm... Asynchronous play we expect a lot of people to do. And then proceeds to make an example as how he could export He3 from his colony to Chris's (Nertea) while he's asleep. 4:37 Nate Simpson: "For the timewarp thing we have a good solution" If that isn't confirmation that they solved the timewarp problem with some sort of asynchronous system I don't know what it is.

A small, but important premise: I'm a serial abuser of struts and autostruts. In KSP1 i always made my rockets as rigid as possible, hunting down any noodling and flex and fixing it. That said. You're right in one thing here, we're talking about an intentional design choice, not a bug, nor a fail in optimizing. When they showed, at the very beginning, the first shot of a rocket noodling around (in a comical, exaggerated way) it was to showcase that the flex between joints was still there in the new code. Keyword here being 'showcase' as in "look here! See the flex, this is still KSP!" and not as a bug to be fixed. Another small, but nonetheless important, premise: I'll be happy if they scrap the flex and go with a complete rigid system, or re-implement the same band-aid solution they did in KSP1, autostruts. But. I think there is gameplay to be had in the flex of parts, even when it make your rockets blow up. Like this: This is gameplay, not a bug. If you have a 20m high booster, and you have the decoupler all the way up near the nosecone, the booster should be flexing enough to mess around with the gimbaling of the engine, and either struts or a better placed decoupler is the gameplay answer to that. Same thing when you use the smallest possible decoupler on the biggest rockets, it should flex like a ball joint, otherwise it would make no sense to use the appropriately sized decouplers. Now onto something I'm sure will be a little bit more controversial, this: From Matt Lowne last gameplay video, is not a bug either, but gameplay too. Why? Because of this connection: A 3.75m fairing, connected to a 1.25m lander, connected to a 2.5m service module, and not just that but a payload that's half the height of the rocket. (I'm not accusing Matt Lowne of not being able to build a rocket, he built a full Duna mission in 20 minutes, so let's give him some slack) The game has plenty of options (thanks @Space Scumbag for the video) to allow you to stack smaller diameter stuff neatly into fairings: What I'd love to see on top of that is a ring fairing base instead of a full one to allow you to combine fairing with structural tubes and pack landers in tubes like the Apollo missions, and to solve the "fairing too high" problem Matt had in the video. Tank-tank connections could be a little more rigid, and maybe parts should break apart when they flex after a certain amount, and the system does need some overall balancing, but flexing has the potential to be a meaningful and interesting design gameplay loop.

"All your theories are wrong! Here's the only way multiplayer can work!" Proceeds to spend 3 pages arguing for their personal flavor of MP. A new user appears, "All your theories are wrong! Here's..." Multiply that by 20.

Steam. Superior services are worth a higher price, it becomes a no-brainer to me when the price is the same. I've bought Sea Of Thieves on Steam after trying it on the Gamepass and all my friends that play it did the same.

In a corner, the new methane jet engines are sweating profusely, feeling lucky that nobody noticed them yet.

Maybe I suck at coordinating, but that sounds like a nightmare even with two players. Playing stellaris, which has a simple simulation speed setting, we were basically always playing at the same speed, even with 2/3 players talking in Discord the whole time.

You should take a look at Dyson Sphere Program late game if you haven't reached/seen it.

In a way yes, you're right. But I'd say that your statement isn't complete. As you said wings are going to be harder, but planes, especially big ones, are actually going to be easier. More difficult to chose the right wing for the job (luckily in KSP even bricks fly) but way easier to obtain that specific shape once you have it in mind. Don't think only about small 1.25m planes, the first time I saw those 5 meters cargo bays my first idea was about doing a huge SSTO plane with them, and tanks to procedural wings that's going to be a 100 parts plane and kit a 600 parts one (500 of which a mosaic of microscopic wing segments).

Can't wait to get to play around with planes and the new wings, I have a couple of missions in mind already.

That's what this is replacing. And that's what is going to happen, "place and forget" is pretty much the design philosophy stated by Devs. But you're skipping the set-up phase. As I said, optimizing the ratio between drills and furnaces is not something that has any place in KSP (it would be fun as a mod), but that doesn't mean no setups. The parts that are worth keeping are those problems that are solved by a KSP mission. Scanning for resources? An excuse for a mapping satellite in a polar orbit. Deploying a drill? It's a dedicated lander that maybe requires some setup from a crew of engineers. Moving the mined stuff to the colony? That's a rover/plane/suborbital reusable rocket you have to build, test and fly. And it's automatic with the supply route system after the test flight, place and forget. Colonies then have just converters (factories, refineries and whatnot) that run on those resources that require to be brought there (with a KSP mission) on build in place with resources, and add to the colony EC consumption, nothing more complex. No belts, pipes, or complex networks of arrays of furnaces and assemblers. Then you find your new "money-like" resource (or resources) to build the stuff you want in the colony VAB. Same for fuels. Need more resources? Time-warp a month. Want a higher resource cap? Add a storage module, it's a nice excuse to make colonies bigger. Want faster production times? Again, plop more modules, that colony is growing. Want more mined resources? That's just more KSP missions, maybe you have an old colony somewhere that already produces heaps of that resource, time for a mission between two random planets that aren't Kerbin to set up that cargo route. Ever did a Duna-Laythe round mission? I haven't. As long as you don't have to wait literally years to gather the required resources with unoptimized setups, you won't be spending any time optimizing ratios using spreadsheets. Well, at least, I think the game should be balanced like that. The Devs stated multiple times that milk runs are going to be automated and you won't need to babysit colonies after you set them up.

Simple as in with little middle steps. Raw ore => Copper => Copper wire => Green Circuits => Radars => Rocket Part Works fine for Factorio, but in KSP2 most of that would be colony micro-management. They should make it more abstract and skip most of the steps that usually don't imply a transport between them. Moving around "spare parts" or "rocket components" make sense if you want your factories planetside and your VAB orbital, but I wouldn't add any intermediate step between the raw materials and those rocket parts (like the Copper Wire in Factorio). Building something that actually works beats grinding random generated contracts that don't even make logical sense. I don't see this much as a "nowadays sandbox games have base building" but just a required step of space exploration. Without in-situ resource utilisation and off-planet construction you're not going far in space.

KSP2 is more a veichle simulation game, so more than Factorio I hope they go the OTTD way (the game Factorio has lifted its train system from) with the transport/logistic having a front and center role and the resource chain being as simple as possible.

Keep in mind that, as absurd as it sounds, rockets are actually pretty rare in space games. People will come to KSP as fan of smace games, knowing everything about spaceships and FTL and nothing about what a rocket is.