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Sandbox misconceptions?


regex

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I've been playing for years, since before there was career or science.

Most of my games tend to be career mode.  I use sandbox for testing mods or various ideas, but career mode is where my serious playtime is.  I like the progression, stepping up from suborbital to orbital, and beyond.  However, I hate the ever-living hell out of contracts.  I'll accept a few of them, if they aren't getting in my way.  I'm going to the Mun anyway, so I'll accept the "Explore the Mun" contract.  I'm going to be in orbit, so I'll accept the "Return science from orbit" one.  I've only ever done one rescue, and that was just to see if Chuck Kerman was a pilot.  If I get a part test that involves some part I'm going to use in the normal course of a flight, I'll do it.  But I refuse to go out of my way to do any of the contracts.

I did install a mod to reduce building prices and the Science Funding mod, though.  I like career mode, but I don't see any reason to let it stand in the way of me having fun.

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47 minutes ago, Red Iron Crown said:

I think most of us who cut our KSP teeth before science and career modes were implemented had high hopes for career, what with having directed goals plus tech and financial limitations. But none of that was ready yet, so we all had to learn to set our own goals and impose our own restrictions.

^ This.

Once we are used to play wiith our own goals and restrictions, they have more sense than career mode. And they fit better to our playstyle.  Thats why many of us don't like the career mode. Our self impossed rules have more sense to us.

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Due to an obsession with experimental craft, I largely play sandbox.  I like science mode and career, as it can be fun to have to earn parts, and contracts/upgradable buildings makes for for a fun challenge mode wherein I get to be excessively minimal about things.  However, I often find myself going back to sandbox to safely test things, like designing a set of standard lifters for a career at some tech level (a task I have yet to complete).  In fact, I have not once completed a science tree or career mode game.  Too much fun designing weird things and testing thermal equilibria with nukes and infinite fuel.

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1 hour ago, regex said:

News to me, that's how I felt it played, especially when I wanted rewards for going to, say, Dres before the explore contract showed up.  World's Firsts aren't good enough to justify "just going" and the World's Firsts strategy is way too expensive to bother with.

How on earth are the world's firsts not enough to justify sending a mission to Dres? You get √286.6k for a simple flags and footprints mission - on hard.

 

1 hour ago, regex said:

See, that's the rub, we all enjoy how certain parts of the game play and we generally stick to those.

Then why are you bashing a mode that you hardly ever play?

Edited by Armisael
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I'm a career player.  What I like about it is helping create the sense of building and going back to a place. My early Mun landings are primitive affairs. My first (in the latest career) landing being via a probe sent to accomplish the World Firsts flyby and orbit missions. It was never intended to land, but I realized it had sufficient dV so down it goes. It got me a little extra science early for little extra time and no extra funds and reused a vehicle past its intended mission. My similar probe to Minimus then does something similar, and me getting greedy attempt extra biomes and splatter it across the surface with a piloting error. I next start up the Kerbaled missions. Three launch vehicles send up a specialized lander, extra fuel, and the capsule for the Kerbal out and returned. Using all 1.25 parts, the probes are driving and the Kerbal is the scientist. All three dock around the Mun, the lander makes multiple landings and delivers the science to the return capsule for a big haul. Efficiency in money spent and science returned (for me) ends up being roughly the same as had I sent three different self contained missions. However, the self contained missions carry far greater risk to the Kerbal as the land and return vehicle at that tech stage ends up being tall and difficult to land. In previous careers I once sent 4 different rescue missions to the same Kerbal as I had trouble landing on slopes. My three part mission allowed a lander designed using the swept wings as the lander legs. No suspension, but strong wide and light weight far more stable landing on slopes. HOWEVER it's highly dangerous and inefficient getting it out of Kerbins atmosphere due to drag. It took several launches before figuring out how to launch safely and I did those launches in career without reverting and without testing in sandbox. I had to make the call if sending them up was economically justified and it turned out to be a good thing they weren't manned.  

I'm now in the process of developing a new generation of lander using 2.5 parts. Designed to land 2 Kerbals, include wheels to rover to nearby biomes to save fuel (and new science equipment). I'm adding to the fuel depot a sci lab, and improving the shuttle vehicle as well.

After this phase will come my fully integrated landing facility complete with sci lab, ore drilling and processing and a fuel tanker. The Mun may have a larger gravity well, but it's tidally locked allowing launches to predictably end up over the same part of the far side of the Mun where the base is located. 

Nothing stops me from doing this in sandbox. But career forces part restrictions on me to simulate the different phases. In sandbox I'm too tempted to just start with phase 4. I've got the parts and no worry about funds, so why not?  But I like the story that evolves "naturally " with career. 

I can't stand grinding. So I have the game set up so I don't have to. I set to hard, then change science to 50% and funds to 100% and turn quick saves back on (for Kraken insurance only). Science grinding is fun as it forces me to explore different biomes on the Mun and Minimus (I do minimal science on Kerbin) and set to 50% means Duna science is still relevant. Funds at 100% means I do no more than a couple "paying the bills" missions like launching satellites. But funds ARE relevant and I have to weigh them went I want to do a mission outside of game offered missions. These constraints add to my enjoyment in a way that playing sandbox and saying "keep this mission under X funds" doesn't appeal to me. I have an in game reason to keep funds low. I also really enjoy unlocking the advanced parts like the nuke that open up all new design territory that I didn't have before. New personal missions open up that weren't available before and with comes a feeling of accomplishment. 

Playing sandbox doesn't offer to me quite the same experience even though I could every exact mission. The difference is the context in which the missions are done. Getting to the Mun the first for anyone probably feels good regardless of career or sandbox. Sandbox players then seem to either

A) build crazy big (cool) things

B) do the tours of the different locations (each with their own challenges)

C) self-impose get to X place with Y constraints 

Career allows me to do all three of these things. It just adds 

D) make choices regarding science and funds budgets while doing the above. And this encourages a different set of missions.

It is clear not everyone finds D enjoying. There is no reason to think ourselves better or worse based upon what we and others find enjoyable within the game. 

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4 hours ago, regex said:

I generally have no problems building efficiently using personal restrictions and following a plan to meet a goal I've set when playing in Sandbox mode, and I'm curious why you feel otherwise?

I also have no problems setting goals. I just like to achieve them within limits set by an outside force. Sometimes that outside force is the game. Sometimes it's a set of mods I've chosen. Sometimes it's a challenge on the forums. But just an open universe with no restrictions - for me - is boring. Just a bunch of mostly featureless worlds with no discernible differences worth putting the time and effort into seeing.

I actually quit KSP early in my time playing it, right after reaching Moho (out of fuel, of course). I wasn't going to go back to it after getting everybody home (that was a goal. I set it myself) and closing up shop. Then "career" mode (what we now call "science" mode) appeared and I played the game non-stop for almost 2 years. That is NO coincidence.

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1 hour ago, regex said:

News to me, that's how I felt it played (...)

You didn't need to, but I appreciate that you're proving my point. Of course, you can grind if you want to. Nobody's going to stop you from doing that. But you don't have to.

For all intents and purposes, let's observe the task of putting a simple space station in Mun orbit as a basis for surface exploration. Shouldn't cost more than 70,000 to launch, but let's throw in a laboratory and a big fuel tank, and call it 100,000 to launch. Oh boy! Sounds like grinding your way through at least 15 parts test to recover that investment!

With a little bit of foresight you've been hoarding the right contracts. First you cash in 75,000 for putting the station in Kerbin orbit (perhaps picking up some pocket change on the way up for hauling & testing parts while you're at it). Don't go straight to Mun from there; let's put in a higher orbit first and cash in 50,000 for a satellite contract (investment: one thermometer), then send it to Mun, receive another 125,000 for putting a station in Munar orbit and then collect another 75,000 for placing a satellite in Mun orbit before placing the station in its final desired orbit. That 275,000 in pure profit for something you wanted to do anyway.

I get tons of fun out of figuring out how to maximize contract yield, while juggling my kerbals around the system to expose them to as much experience as I can.

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5 minutes ago, tranenturm said:

 D) make choices regarding science and funds budgets while doing the above. And this encourages a different set of missions.

I think RIC put it best earlier in the thread, Career wasn't what I expected.  I wanted management, setting of goals, a budget to manage, salaries and upkeep to meet.  What I got was ... randomness.

Ideally I'd like a career where rockets took time to build and roll out to the pad, science took time to research, and buildings took time to get built (KCT), where you set individual goals or designed missions and assigned part of the yearly budget to them, minding the upkeep for each project since they might run into the next year, where doing science didn't accumulate you points it instead earned you rep or additional funding for the same area of research, where rep determined your yearly budget, where parts were researched over time, where astronauts had salaries and buildings required upkeep.  I wanted to run a space program.

Instead of playing Career more, save to familiarize myself with it for each update, I just went back to Sandbox.  It just felt more like running a space program.

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11 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

With a little bit of foresight you've been hoarding the right contracts.

Meanwhile the devs are trying to find ways of making you pay for ditching contracts you don't want while simultaneously decrying the practice as "playing a slot machine" (instead of, say, giving the player tools to direct the space program) while also preventing lucrative practices such as chaining multiple (more than 2) satellite contracts by restricting how many can be in play at the same time.

Granted, once all the buildings are unlocked there is no reason to grind anything.  You've probably got a few science labs running through experiments and you just have to sit back and maybe run a contract now and then if it's already on your way.  It's getting to that point that sucks the life out of the game for me.  Plus, it pretty much feels like sandbox then, no point in not just skipping the drudgery.

RP-0 was a little better, the contracts were all basically milestones and satellites, plus the crewed missions, but by the time I got a few years in I was rolling in cash and launching Vostoks for everything, it became a game of timewarping.

The problem I have with Career mode in KSP is that it has no extra meaning for me past the grind(able) stage, it's basically just Sandbox.  There's no management or direction involved, it's all about the randomly derived fund.  Therefore, Career mode is just grinding to me.

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I play with a sandy career mode. I start with a mod like Tree Toppler to unlock all research nodes, then I use the debug menu to give myself cash whenever I need it. I use the science points as a "score" system and the contracts for the occasional strange challenge / weird idea.

 

So I skip all the grindy bits and effectively end up playing sandbox, but the science parts actually work and give occasionally amusing descriptions.

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I play career mode because the monetary restrictions and penalties to lost Kerbals means there is some risk. Furthermore, I'm a sucker for "progression" in games, and anything that allows me to "feel" that sort of progression sucks me in. Minecraft, for example, I tend to play in Hardcore mode when single player and I tend to do no more than collecting resources to "progress" in the game. I don't really mine out huge elaborate mines, nor do I build large quarries for materials. Rather I prefer to go spelunking for the minerals I need to reach the end to beat the dragon. In Factorio, I tend to build the minimalist factory I need to progress to the point of launching the satelite into space. Etc. Therefore, Career, though it is not my ideal, is the closest thing to such risk/reward KSP offers, and as such, i tend to play it exclusively.

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I love building pretty things that look, develop and function like real rockets, that's why I play sandbox.  I set my own goals, don't use certain parts (for their intended purpose) if I think my space program shouldn't have them in the context of this save (each of my saves has a massive role play segment).  For example, I don't use anything other than the whip antenna as an antenna, but the strip and the tube-dish  are cool looking as structural parts.  I do realistic mission progression too--flyby, orbiter, impactor, probe lander, kerballed flyby, kerballed orbit, kerballed landing, base/ISRU station.

to continue the minecraft analogy, I first played creative (there was barley survival then) but even when it got better, I only played it a few times.  It's a lot more fun on multiplayer.  Career mode will be too I bet.

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KSP's sandbox offers many failure modes: explosions, premature parachutes, running out of fuel, overheating, crashing into the surface, etc. By contrast, it's basically impossible to fail at anything in creative Minecraft; you can't starve or suffocate or burn up, monsters can't hurt you. In that sense they're very different game modes, and KSP challenges the player in all of its modes.

Nonetheless, I find my ability to make my own goals can be enriched by having more currencies in the game. As an analogy, a kid in real life might set himself the goal of becoming a millionaire by age 25. If money doesn't exist, that goal can't be set, let alone met. There's also something appealing about receiving a reward for improving a design's efficiency.

I'm in sandbox most of the time lately, but I want to believe in career. :huh:

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8 hours ago, regex said:

I generally have no problems building efficiently using personal restrictions and following a plan to meet a goal I've set when playing in Sandbox mode, and I'm curious why you feel otherwise?

I feel as you do (for once :D ).  I date from when there was only sandbox, no career.  And yet this forum was filled with people striving for efficiency, doing reusable rockets, and all that.  KSP is at least as much about engineering as it is about controlling ships in space and seeing other planets up close.  And engineers can't help but try for efficiency even if there's no practical value to it in gameplay terms.

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@regex you did open up kind of condescending on career players, but I think your last 2 posts clarify the issue: you want to play career, but the current implementation is just terrible. I understand you completely, I'm in the same position. It is a random contract generator, there is no flow or rhyme. Why would testing same part on Kerbin going exactly n m/s be different than testing it on surface of the Mun? It makes no sense and it is actually breaking the immersion.

I really like part restrictions, I really want to work within the limits of the available parts and other restrictions but the tech tree is meh at best. Every time I start the career, I get annoyed then go hunting for mods, which usually end up bloated because they are trying to integrate everything from the mods forum (so you end up with half empty tech tree and empty nodes, which break the immersion) or just go into other extreme and limit you too much.

So I give up and wait for the next version or the next mod to show up. I'm still waiting and it does not look like it will end anywhere soon.

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12 hours ago, regex said:

Ideally I'd like a career where rockets took time to build and roll out to the pad, science took time to research, and buildings took time to get built (KCT), where you set individual goals or designed missions and assigned part of the yearly budget to them, minding the upkeep for each project since they might run into the next year, where doing science didn't accumulate you points it instead earned you rep or additional funding for the same area of research, where rep determined your yearly budget, where parts were researched over time, where astronauts had salaries and buildings required upkeep.  I wanted to run a space program.

This. There are entire games based around management which, though certainly not for everyone, can be quite fun. Building a legitimate light management game around career mode would certainly add a lot to KSP in my opinion. KCT is fantastic and adds the time aspect to things but doesn't touch other parts. What career mode needs imo is a much more interesting resource management on program level. Something a bit more complex than "do I have kredits to launch this thing?". Upkeep for things, wages, training programs, running R&D costs, etc. This might be a bit too much for what Squad has in mind for the base game, so maybe mod(s)...

One thing that always puzzled me was the science points. How exactly does knowing the composition of a mun rock help me develop a new guidance system? In my opinion science should be the success condition for contracts and/or be used to generate income by selling the data. This income would then be used to fund R&D programs. I know it's a game and games love all kinds of point systems, but still...

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I use sandbox. For me the other modes don't really offer anything more. I set my own goals and limitations and I find them more reasonable and fun than those in career mode. Efficiency in funds, parts, fuel, crew, etc all matter in my sandbox. Missions meant to test parts are actually real tests with meaning too which makes them more interesting than career counterparts. I typically invert the order of manned and probe flights. I want to make sure than any mission with a live crew has a 99.99% success rate, so it usually follows dozens of probe missions. My Mun landing is a good example. Before any Kerbals got near the Mun I sent two orbital scanners and something like six landers to scout for landing spots. I then sent a few more landers with return probes to test the return flight. This was primarily with 1.25 size rockets as well.

 

One negative is that I have to keep track of where I am all the time. The game doesn't do it for me. It would be nice if it did and I imagine that people playing career mode feel the same way. It certainly is easier to have the game give you goals than to make your own. If all a player wants to do is build, then having goals handed out will save a bunch of time.

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16 minutes ago, Teutooni said:

This. There are entire games based around management which, though certainly not for everyone, can be quite fun. Building a legitimate light management game around career mode would certainly add a lot to KSP in my opinion. KCT is fantastic and adds the time aspect to things but doesn't touch other parts. What career mode needs imo is a much more interesting resource management on program level. Something a bit more complex than "do I have kredits to launch this thing?". Upkeep for things, wages, training programs, running R&D costs, etc.

My one concern around this is that to me, the greatest strengths of KSP are the parts that simulate real-ish things, i.e., rockets and orbits. Sure, we don't need ullage motors (most of us, anyway), and we don't have to worry about the N-body problem, but we still suffer under the tyranny of the rocket equation, and struggling through that learning curve feels "worth it" partly because it's based on a real thing.

I'm not convinced that the administration of a real space program can be simulated that way. Charlie Bolden's job is probably not very fun or game-like, and the moon landings were made possible as much by external factors like the Cold War and the memory of JFK as they were by gradual experience and technical progress within NASA itself. They had an unbelievable amount of (arguably "unearned" in a gaming sense) money for a few years, and then after possibly the most iconic achievement in human history, it got cut down to scraps. Anything short of that is going to be "unrealistic" by definition.

Suppose they do add a reasonably accurate management simulation. Is it simulating something fun, like rocketry and astrogation? No, it's simulating being a bureaucrat. The more work they put into it, the better a simulation it will become of being a bureaucrat. And if your space program starts to tank, how will it feel if it seems to be happening because something's wrong with the modeling of wages? Better to focus career mode on driving engagement with the core physics gameplay via missions and some kind of tech progression.

16 minutes ago, Teutooni said:

One thing that always puzzled me was the science points. How exactly does knowing the composition of a mun rock help me develop a new guidance system? In my opinion science should be the success condition for contracts and/or be used to generate income by selling the data. This income would then be used to fund R&D programs. I know it's a game and games love all kinds of point systems, but still...

Yeah; those two things (where you've explored and the capabilities of your ships) are supposed to increase in parallel, so they got directly connected somewhat arbitrarily. It doesn't make sense if you think about it, but on the other hand, it does provide motivation and reward for planning and executing missions.

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4 hours ago, Corw said:

@regex you did open up kind of condescending on career players

It wasn't meant to be but people took it that way.  Up thread there's a post about how people interpret things and about how, without additional qualifiers like "IMO" and "I feel like", we take things as personal attacks.  Well, I try to inject those sorts of qualifiers beforehand while reading other's posts.  All the reasons given in the OP for not liking sandbox come from mainly career players so I take it that they feel the way they do for a reason.  None of those reasons apply to me, personally, since I manage just fine.  Similarly, if none of those reasons apply to you for not playing sandbox mode then why do you feel as if you're being condescended towards?

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