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Money, revisited


Pthigrivi

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So we've talked about this before but I didn't feel like necrobumping old threads. I've been thinking about this again though and I still can't decide if Adventure mode would benefit from or be distracted by an in-game currency besides science/research points, or if the two could be combined in some way. This gets into all kinds of complicated assumptions and we have no idea if all this hasn't been decided anyway but hey whats this forum for but wanton speculation. For the purposes of discussion Im going to assume Boom events are real and could have additional rewards besides population boosts, and that there's some (hopefully streamlined) mechanism for employing experiments and getting data back. I'll say from the beginning that I think both combined and uncombined reward currencies can work and there are pros and cons to each. A few ideas from the outset:

1) Replace contracts with Boom events
As clever as KSP1's generative contracts are I think most people have felt underwhelmed by them. I think as a central system of rewards you can just create boom events for a series of milestones and discoveries and let players go out and get them in whatever order they want. There might be some hand-holding at the beginning with tutorials but after that it should be a fully open world. These might include: altitude and speed records, flyby's, orbits, landings, and flag plantings, discovering anomalies, establishing and growing stations + colonies, etc. The whole administration building could be replaced with an interface tracking your progress on these goals. 

2) Time based mechanics:
This is just something to think about. My feeling is that having at least some time-based mechanism is good, but the simpler it is the better. KCT is interesting but injects a lot of extra timers and steps. It's better if there are just one or two things that take time and require very little player input or micromanagement. The reason having at least one mechanism that takes time could be important is that in a counterintuitive way puts a cap on grind. Right now there's an incentive for players to grind out dozens of small-reward missions around KSoI in between every launch window, slowly grinding science and money while they wait. There are other ways to cap this--reducing the amount of science that's available in the early game or placing some other cap until you've explored other planets--but you still end up in a herky-jerky pacing where you do a bunch of small missions around Kerbin then time warp for months until your next launch window. Making it so research takes time or using some other built-in delay between missions would smooth things out and increase the number of transfer windows per minute played, speeding up the rate at which most players explore the Kerbolar system. Folks have also often asked for things like monthly budgets, but this creates a host of other problems with time warp and could end up being a pain to manage. To me, keep it simple: do missions, get rewards, spend rewards.

3) You don't need money...
A lot of games, especially ones that focus on resources, don't have a central fungible currency like money. There are a lot of ways KSP could work just on science and resources and not need money at all. One way this could work would be to have a resource plant built-in at KSC producing raw materials and fuels the same way a colony would. As your program developed you could spend research on increasing its speed, capacity, and capabilities. It would solve some of the pacing issues above and avoid some of the fail-state pitfalls of other schemes, but its also another thing to manage in an already complicated game. Once you've started setting up off-world colonies with their own production systems the game actually gets less complicated though as money just doesn't exist for you to worry about. It's just pure exploration and discovery in exchange for tech upgrades.

4) But maybe money is good?
At the same time having a secondary currency has its advantages. You could for instance separate out building upgrades from part-unlocks, or have parts that were cheap in terms of raw materials but expensive in money to produce. You could have boom events give money but still require science experiments to advance tech. It would also allow for some creative economies in which rare resources are delivered to Kerbin for cash, which could then be exchanged for other resources, upgrades, etc. There could also be space tourism or other clever income systems. In some ways this is overall a more complicated kind of game, but maybe thats okay? 

What do you all think?
 

Edited by Pthigrivi
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This is a great system, although it probably belongs in the Suggestions section. I will restate my opinion from when the resource plant idea was first brought up, that a central fungible currency is really useful throughout the game to convert certain resources into other resources, and it would be a mere blip in the complexity of supply routes, simply a matter of setting a rate to convert resource A into money at rate X and turn that money into resource B, which can then be shipped to colonies in need. 

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Just now, t_v said:

This is a great system, although it probably belongs in the Suggestions section. 

Yeah I never know for threads like this? Like if its a suggestion definitely, but if its just a broad theoretical discussion about a mechanic? 

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I always feel that when I'm playing a career game, and I stockpile enough funds from stacking grand tour contracts, the game starts to feel like the science gamemode instead. Contracts become pointless, and so does the money. Only thing left is to eliminate the remaining tech tree nodes.

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Money is one of those mechanics in KSP where it may not be necessary, but it can have its uses. In the early game I can see the use of money, but as the game progresses, the need will definitely drop.

Boom events can work for bonuses, but a good steady source of money is contracts/missions. Contracts isn't necessarily a bad thing, but there needs to be a better variety of objectives and durations for them. Of course a background source of money wouldn't hurt either.

 

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I've always preferred the idea of having a monthly or annual funding based on your reputation, with some contracts giving you bonus money. To prevent players from just timewarping to get money you could have your reputation decay over time.

I do like the idea of ditching money altogether and using material resources instead though, since that plays into colonies very nicely.

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Making funds in KSP would be nice if it followed a frontier model, where you do the first few boundary-pushing launches of a complicated mission, and then get the opportunity to "automate" it, letting it run in the background.

Much like how SpaceX is using starlink to get funds. It gets boring by the 5th launch of the same vehicle just to make some funds, and by that time the player has proven that they could get infinite funds from just repeating that. As long as it requires some setup and effort on the player's part to get the system going at first, it would be great to just automate that later.

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I've thought of a funny idea: "Congress Difficulty", where funding is always ridiculously low, forcing you to consider new ways of using your money effectively.

Failing to meet the quota results in funding being cut further. Doing too well also results in funding being cut further.

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5 hours ago, intelliCom said:

I've thought of a funny idea: "Congress Difficulty", where funding is always ridiculously low, forcing you to consider new ways of using your money effectively.

Failing to meet the quota results in funding being cut further. Doing too well also results in funding being cut further.

And the politics is king. So your funding raises and falls from time to time for no good reason.

That's a game mode to really slow your progression to a crawl. 

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9 hours ago, Blaarkies said:

Making funds in KSP would be nice if it followed a frontier model, where you do the first few boundary-pushing launches of a complicated mission, and then get the opportunity to "automate" it, letting it run in the background.

Much like how SpaceX is using starlink to get funds. It gets boring by the 5th launch of the same vehicle just to make some funds, and by that time the player has proven that they could get infinite funds from just repeating that. As long as it requires some setup and effort on the player's part to get the system going at first, it would be great to just automate that later.

I've thought about that but it gets tricky because of timewarp. There'd have to be some limit there or players would set up a little funding operation and time-warp to infinite money. There are other solutions like giving players bonuses for reaching Duna or colonizing Jool within X days, but this hard to calibrate too. Its difficult to gauge how fast different players will explore in terms of the game-clock. A lot of people like me will probably be sending out probes and crewed exploration vessels and colony hardware on most every transfer window with dozens of active flights at a time. Others might want to play more sequentially--follow their Duna mission all the way to its destination without breaking to do other things while its in transit. I think in the end the incentives of building and growing colonies and having automated supply routes going everywhere will mean most players end up in the former boat anyway though, so maybe there's nothing wrong with giving rewards for winning an invisible space race. 

Edited by Pthigrivi
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1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

I've thought about that but it gets tricky because of timewarp. 

Yeah completely agree. All time-based mechanics have this problem, but in normal difficulty you can already make 5 million funds every 20 minutes by just doing the rally contracts. If players want near-infinite money, they can certainly get it without this.

If there was a way to sell a service by having a specific craft, it could motivate players more to build proper surface bases instead of the bare minimum to fulfil the contract.

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Challenges & Donats

P.S.
Kerbal followers on a iKphone display. Land on the moon ark, and they will donate in real time.

The more challenges you have performed - the more followers you have.

The more followers - the higher is the donation probability

P.P.S.
Achievements, say, like from Saints Row III, like "every close fly-by" and so.

(Also donated.)

Edited by kerbiloid
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On 2/9/2022 at 5:24 AM, intelliCom said:

I've thought of a funny idea: "Congress Difficulty"

That's funny in the "what the heck" kind of way, not funny in the "ha ha" way.

I always feel like NASA's funding is some form of cruel joke, and that politicians should have no say in how it gets used.

Were that the case, NASA wouldn't have the rug pulled out from under it every 4-8 years, and assuming the funding total amount stayed roughly the same, they'd be getting a lot more done.

I mean think about it, how many "shuttle-replacement" vehicle concepts got canceled over the years? Last time I checked we had NASP, VentureStar, HL-20, and a few others. Heck even the X-37 was supposed to eventually become a manned vehicle before the design pivoted to what it is today.

Also it would have been nice if the Space Shuttle wasn't all we got, and we in fact got the whole "STS" system, complete with the space tugs and moon lander all being carried into orbit by the Shuttle.

Basically, we came up with a mansion, then we came up with a truck to deliver the building supplies to the mansion build site, then all we got money for was the truck. You can understand how I feel cheated.

EDIT:

And now for a whole different tangent.

Why are we stuck with the thought of a single clock that applies to every vessel in the game?

I'm thinking it would be much better to handle it like the "FMRS" mod handles time for the segments of the booster that you want to recover, in that you get to "re-wind" time and go back and fly them to their landings, if they're intended to be reusable.

But then, you take that concept and apply it to the WHOLE GAME. Except, to avoid time paradoxes, when you want to synchronize the clocks of two vessels (for docking them or what have you), you run the orbit forward (via time warp) of the vessel that has the clock that is "in the past" relative to the other vessel.

This would also solve the "not everyone wants to time warp the same amount at the same time" problem with KSP multiplayer, as well as solving the "time warp to infinite money" problem with passive income methods.

The basic idea is that time would only progress for a vessel when you're actively piloting it, or if you selected it to be synchronized to another vessel and it's the one of the two that's in the past.

In other words, when you time warp one vessel forwards, you don't time warp all the other vessels forwards. Just that one vessel.

What this does is that you can suddenly do things almost at the same time, because you (the controlling force of you being the player of the game) can effectively be in more than one place at the same time, or be in more than one time at the same place, or almost any combination of those.

 

Thoughts? I have no idea how you'd code such a thing, but the obvious part that I can think of is that you'd have to track MET separately for every vessel. Then again, time is just another variable in a physics simulation, right? You can run it backwards and forwards as much as you want, the only time you can't is when you're interacting with it. That's the key reason this whole idea of mine might even have half a chance of working.

Edited by SciMan
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On 2/10/2022 at 3:44 AM, Pthigrivi said:

There'd have to be some limit there or players would set up a little funding operation and time-warp to infinite money.

Easy solution: Diminishing return. You only get about 66.6% of what you got the previous time you did it. It approaches a maximum value.

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12 hours ago, SciMan said:

This would also solve the "not everyone wants to time warp the same amount at the same time" problem with KSP multiplayer, as well as solving the "time warp to infinite money" problem with passive income methods.

The basic idea is that time would only progress for a vessel when you're actively piloting it, or if you selected it to be synchronized to another vessel and it's the one of the two that's in the past.

In other words, when you time warp one vessel forwards, you don't time warp all the other vessels forwards. Just that one vessel.

What this does is that you can suddenly do things almost at the same time, because you (the controlling force of you being the player of the game) can effectively be in more than one place at the same time, or be in more than one time at the same place, or almost any combination of those.

I had a very similar idea a while ago, and there are some big flaws with it. Putting aside the mess that is rendering other players' ship trajectories as they warp (either have a craft zoom out to deep space and then suddenly see it orbiting Jool or show a really weird warped trajectory that takes into account the motion of the planets the craft will be intersecting with), there are also the gameplay problems. Let's say you want to rendezvous with a craft. There are two ways to handle that, either by allowing you to just warp forwards to get to that craft (completely negating a big part of gameplay and stopping players from learning how to rendezvous properly), or by forcing time to synchronize if you want to get within physics range of a craft (which becomes a problem if you suddenly want to dock to a station after 12 transfers and many orbits). Overall, that system has limitations that go beyond simple, easily solved problems. Still, this solution would probably be the best for having fun, as you would be able to warp as desired without the repercussion that you find yourself in an increasingly less populated time bubble, separated from the other players. If the dev team finds a way to fix these issues, then this way of handling warp would probably be the best. 

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59 minutes ago, t_v said:

I had a very similar idea a while ago, and there are some big flaws with it. Putting aside the mess that is rendering other players' ship trajectories as they warp (either have a craft zoom out to deep space and then suddenly see it orbiting Jool or show a really weird warped trajectory that takes into account the motion of the planets the craft will be intersecting with), there are also the gameplay problems. Let's say you want to rendezvous with a craft. There are two ways to handle that, either by allowing you to just warp forwards to get to that craft (completely negating a big part of gameplay and stopping players from learning how to rendezvous properly), or by forcing time to synchronize if you want to get within physics range of a craft (which becomes a problem if you suddenly want to dock to a station after 12 transfers and many orbits). Overall, that system has limitations that go beyond simple, easily solved problems. Still, this solution would probably be the best for having fun, as you would be able to warp as desired without the repercussion that you find yourself in an increasingly less populated time bubble, separated from the other players. If the dev team finds a way to fix these issues, then this way of handling warp would probably be the best. 

And it would eat a lot of memory to recall what did the ship do when changing it in real-time for other players.

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Instead of storing the coordinates, store the math used to describe those coordinates.

There's even an existing thing in IRL space travel and astronomy for doing exactly that. "Ephemeris Data" is the collective name for all the various orbital parameters you need to precisely determine the current position and trajectory of any body orbiting any other body. The reason that some of it is inaccurate in RL is because of the limited accuracy and limited observation time of our instruments, but for things in Earth orbit that have their own guidance systems (like satellites and spacecraft) the Earth-based observations of the orbit of said craft are critical to keeping those guided objects aware of their own positions, because no matter how good your spacecraft's Inertial Measurement Unit (basically a combination of a 3-axis Gyroscope, a 3-axis Accelerometer, and a computer with a memory to integrate the trajectory), they will drift over time without some form of absolute reference. GPS can help this for satellites in orbits significantly lower than the GPS satellites, but to keep the GPS satellites in the right orbits, they need to have their trajectories observed from the ground and then have that data (appropriately processed) sent to the satellites so that they can send the proper signals to indicate where they are.

 

Anyways, my whole point is that Ephemeris data stays EXACTLY THE SAME for as long as something's in a given orbit, all you need to determine exactly where something in orbit is, is the current position, current time, and the ephemeris data of the thing that you want to find out where it's been in the past.
Therefore, the data only gets bigger when you adjust the orbit or change SOI (or likely when you dock or undock to/from something).
So, craft that use lots of gravity assists would be the thing with the most "orbit data" to store, and even then that likely wouldn't be all that much.

So with 4 pieces of information (2 of which are related to time), you can exactly determine where any orbiting object currently is, and track it indefinitely into the future assuming it doesn't change its orbit.

To handle "orbit adjustments", because that happens a lot in KSP and space travel in general, you simply need to add 2 more pieces of information every time the orbit changes. Those would be the time when the object finished changing its orbit, and its updated ephemeris data.

Docking merely makes two things have the same ephemeris data, and updates their "starting coordinates and starting time" variables as well.

Undocking is simply a copy/paste of the ephemeris data and coordinates of the previously single vessel into two different vessels, with adjustments to the coordinates to account for the fact that the two craft will not be able to share the same origin, and adjusting the ephemeris data to account for any "undocking force" that the docking port may have supplied (which can be treated as an "orbital adjustment").
Staging and when craft are otherwise broken into multiple pieces is handled exactly like Undocking.

SOI changes are handled similarly to orbital adjustments, but you need to add more data to be able to project it backwards or forwards.
The additional things you add are a reference to the ephemeris data of the celestial object that defines the SOI that the vessel is leaving (and entering), the absolute time that the SOI change occurs, and the coordinates where the SOI change happened in both spheres of influence.

You might be able to get away with less if you do more complicated math, but I know that this much data will always constrain the vessel's position to exactly one point in space at one point in time, always.

For interstellar travel, this does assume the existence of a "interstellar SOI" with a mass in the center that the stars of all of the star systems are orbiting around (that can be put really far away tho so that it doesn't really change interstellar craft's trajectories that much).

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A lot of great ideas, it's a pleasure reading the thread.

About money

I think it's still a very necessary resource for KSP. As a min maxer, when I first got my hands on KSP, I optimized my craft by weight, which led me to put tens of jet engines in every first stage, which felt wrong. I know it's on me, but now that we have money, optimizing with it, and with part count constraints as well feels a lot better; it's the sole reason I started appreciating SRBs and stopped putting ion engines everywhere. It makes sense relative to real life and it add really interesting game-play challenges, where cheap and dirty works great for disposable first stages, but expensive and efficient is better for upper stage whose inefficiencies would be multiplied over the whole craft.

I don't think we should replace it entirely with resources. In theory, money could be entirely replaced by resources, production chain, logistic systems and time, but a Factorio + KSP most likely makes for too big of a game. I'm pretty sure KSP2 is intended to still put priority on exploration over  exploitation. Being able to buy a rocket with a single resource or for free is necessary for a smooth early game and beginner experience, and free rockets just is not good for me, and probably hard to balance against colony resources.

Spending money is a non issue, money can simply be made into the resource with which you buy things on Kerbin, in virtually unlimited amount (unlimited as in money being the only limit). The more you colonize, the more in situ resource you use, the less relevant it becomes, and it progressively gets replaced by a more complex resource system. The game would seamlessly  transition from simple exploration to exploration + exploitation. In this paradigm, you essentially own every colony. An alternative system could be that you'd have to buy things from the colony you built, but that sounds like actual economy, harder to manage for the player and much harder to code properly.

Defining how to earn money is the challenging part, and yeah I think contracts, as good as they are, need an overhaul.

However, I do not think automatic infinite money necessarily causes an issue when used along time warp:

  1. If a player wants infinite money, let them have it. It's much better than asking them to grind easy contracts that aren't meant to (they are meant to prevent deadlock).
  2. Once you start any kind of business requiring upkeep, be it life support or colony/space station maintenance, time becomes a factor you cannot just warp away.
  3. Related to 2, one could implement running cost and profit. For an example of running profit: "Set up a satellites mission for coverage around Kerbin" becomes a one time mission, and generate revenue (from TV/com/internet) for ever once completed. No more grind. For example of running cost: number of Kerbonauts, Kerbin's infrastructure, Settlements (you have to continuously pay the first few settlers and after that the administration, in return they pop mission for permanent revenue given some time and infrastructure, mostly resource extraction but possibly tourism as well).
  4. Using 3, you can require budget to be balanced, even if you have a huge provision; so you would still have to put efforts into missions before going sandbox mods, mission which let you immerse and prepare meaningful infrastructure for colonies, and entices you to build such colonies.
  5. Using 3, make the missions multipart, including some maintenance that you have to do only once, but after a while. For example, it could start with optional experimental contracts, that are trivial and let you test parts teach you the fundamental, and earn a penny; then a setup part where you actually do something that is here to stay or is supposed to be done repeatedly in the background, at the end of which you earn a stream of revenue. Then sprinkled over the years a couple optional routine missions, preferably each unique (eg, slightly alter a satellite orbit, and put a new, more powerful antenna). Routine checks could be used to encourage good practice, they could be situational  and not pop at all if you over engineered your craft (eg. put an antenna with a better rating than strict minimum during setup). Finally based on the routine checks you skipped, a single critical failure mission where the money stream halts until you address the issue. Upon earning a stream of revenue, the game warns you that you will have some maintenance to do in the future, and upon completing the last part, it tells you that you no longer have to worry about it. It encourages you to revisit old crafts, and makes it harder to set an easy infinite money scheme.
  6. Just make the game incremental. As in Cookie clicker incremental, where the revenues of letting an early game run overnight at max warp are dwarfed by the revenues (and costs) of a few in game days for a late game Space Program. The kind of incremental in cookie clickers is ludicrous, but is actually very fitting in resource game with epic scope, and even KSP1 scope is epic, there is definitely room and justification for huge discrepancy of prices and revenue between early and late game.
  7. Inflation. Similar to 6, make it so that there is no easy hoarding money with some sort of inflation, time based, progress based or both. It's a bit less user friendly, but you can easily display kerbucks adjusted for inflation so as to keep prices constant (but have account numbers diminishing on their own).
Edited by MADV
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@MADV That is a very well thought out approach to money in the game. Nate did say something that would throw a wrench into your plan though. There will be no failure states do to the lack of money, resources, and life support. So the time warp issue comes up again. (Personally I'm not against players abusing time warp for money and resources, but there are others who are.) So the devs have different ideas about resources in the game. Too bad they have been tight lipped about the adventure mode.

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On 2/18/2022 at 6:46 PM, MADV said:

I think it's still a very necessary resource for KSP. As a min maxer, when I first got my hands on KSP, I optimized my craft by weight, which led me to put tens of jet engines in every first stage, which felt wrong. I know it's on me, but now that we have money, optimizing with it, and with part count constraints as well feels a lot better; it's the sole reason I started appreciating SRBs and stopped putting ion engines everywhere. It makes sense relative to real life and it add really interesting game-play challenges, where cheap and dirty works great for disposable first stages, but expensive and efficient is better for upper stage whose inefficiencies would be multiplied over the whole craft.

Agreed. This is the central advantage, which is that you can potentially have things that cost less in terms of raw materials and more in terms of money. The way other games that don't have money deal with this is they have multiple resources--some more common, some rarer--and requiring rarer resources is what creates relative 'expense'. You could for instance have 2-3 basic resources that parts draw from--Metals, Rare Metals, + Plastics for instance--and different parts would require these in different ratios. Money does the job too, but the devil is in the details.
 

On 2/18/2022 at 6:46 PM, MADV said:

Being able to buy a rocket with a single resource or for free is necessary for a smooth early game and beginner experience,

Maybe not one necessarily, but certainly keeping it down to a few would be important. The easiest way to handle this for new players in an all-resource paradigm would be to give players a starting pool and have the first few batches of parts just require metals and fuels. It wouldn't be till later that you'd need rarer materials. 
 

On 2/18/2022 at 6:46 PM, MADV said:

Spending money is a non issue, money can simply be made into the resource with which you buy things on Kerbin, in virtually unlimited amount (unlimited as in money being the only limit). The more you colonize, the more in situ resource you use, the less relevant it becomes, and it progressively gets replaced by a more complex resource system. The game would seamlessly  transition from simple exploration to exploration + exploitation. In this paradigm, you essentially own every colony. An alternative system could be that you'd have to buy things from the colony you built, but that sounds like actual economy, harder to manage for the player and much harder to code properly.

The other option would be that parts cost money on Kerbin which would include the converted cost of materials, and off Kerbin parts would cost money less the cost of the supplied materials. Doing this would allow relative cost differences to persist later in the game, but it is a bit more complicated. 

Which brings me to the big question: Which out of these options is really the least complicated and the least distraction to core gameplay? Granted, while some elements from factorio like games could dovetail well we wouldn't want the resource system to be anywhere near that complicated. I think its fair to say there probably wont be belts or logic gates, and there will be far fewer intermediate resources. Given all the exotic fuels we're going to need as end-products we'll probably have 3-4 basic harvestable resources at least, and converters and storage tanks for each fuel type. It doesn't seem too crazy that we would also have a few different processed resources that go into making all the types of parts and colony modules. After all engineering and resource management is already a core game element--making sure you have enough fuel and power and radiators to bleed off heat. Making colonies function like simple machines in the same way makes sense. And if thats the case, the thing I've been wondering is whether we need money also. If the game functions without, do we need players to worry about items 1-7 on your list in addition? What are the advantages that outweigh the time they require to manage?

Edited by Pthigrivi
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5 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

The other option would be that parts cost money on Kerbin which would include the converted cost of materials, and off Kerbin parts would cost money less the cost of the supplied materials. Doing this would allow relative cost differences to persist later in the game, but it is a bit more complicated.

I like that best actually. kind of the price of he man hours (Kerbal hours?).

With automatic convoys later bringing resources to colonies (and space stations?), I don't think it would be a distraction from gameplay, or be that complicated.

5 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

If the game functions without, do we need players to worry about items 1-7 on your list in addition? What are the advantages that outweigh the time they require to manage?

In any case, I don't think the players have to worry about item 1 through 7, these are more a myriad of ways in which the developers  could address the "set up production and time-warp" issue, and they are not needed all at once, one or 2 on their own could be largely enough. I think 3 to 5 are probably too much for base game. If I had to bet, the devs will go for mostly 1 ("it's ok to use timewarp to get rich") with a tiny bit of 2 and 6 naturally occurring. 7 could be very simple to set up and powerful, but unnecessarily confusing and punishing to the player.

Without money, you would still have similar issues but with resources, but I guess not as important as you would still have to move them around, or organize their moving around (in other word, you have to play the game, under hopefully interesting constraints).

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Well you could do something rather arbitrary that limits the "time warp to infinite money and/or resources".

Put a cap on how much you can have in total of any one resource at any one time, with the cap being raised as the player progresses thru the game.
In this case, I'm counting Money as "just another resource".

That way you "could" design some grand-tour craft using just the starting parts, but due to the resource caps in place you wouldn't be able to actually build it until you've progressed more (the end state obviously being the complete removal of these resource caps).

This would encourage players that want to build large things early, to do things like launch small sections of it into orbit (potentially to the Orbital VAB) and then weld them together in space (potentially using an Orbital VAB in a similar fashion to an IRL shipyard's dry dock, in that the rest of the shipyard (which would be the VAB on Kerbin) sends sub-assemblies of a ship under construction to the dry dock in a shipyard, instead of sending raw ingots of the materials used to construct said ship).

This has several benefits:

  • It limits the amount of complexity that a player is allowed to actually launch, while not limiting them on the design side of things (so they could do like many people do when building space stations, in that they build the whole station, and then split it up into smaller parts for launch).
  • It can be arranged to (but isn't required to) put a somewhat soft cap on which of many locations the player will be able to reach with their vessels in a single launch (for example, they might be able to send highly complex crewed missions to Kerbin orbit, but only able to send a relatively unsophisticated flyby-only probe to somewhere like Moho).
  • It indirectly encourages a player to create a standard "family" of low (resource or money) cost launch vehicles (for instance, having a standard core + upper stage, with the ability to add varying numbers of SRBs or additional cores, with those lower stage upgrades allowing the use of larger upper stages).

The only downside I can think of is that a few facts must be clearly communicated to the player: You can increase the maximum, How you increase the maximum, and that the end-point is that you no longer have to deal with the resource cap (in order to be able to afford these (almost certainly) fantastically expensive and physically gigantic interstellar-capable vessels that are the eventual end-point of the game.

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On 2/18/2022 at 5:46 PM, MADV said:

Just make the game incremental. As in Cookie clicker incremental, where the revenues of letting an early game run overnight at max warp are dwarfed by the revenues (and costs) of a few in game days for a late game Space Program. The kind of incremental in cookie clickers is ludicrous, but is actually very fitting in resource game with epic scope, and even KSP1 scope is epic, there is definitely room and justification for huge discrepancy of prices and revenue between early and late game.

I've considered this too. It would be entirely reasonable for early rockets to cost millions, interplanetary vessels and colonies to cost billions, and interstellar projects to cost trillions.  Or some similar progression. I think this would be very easy to design and satisfying for the player to progress through.

The trouble is that it's only satisfying once. Because as soon as you've made it into the second tier, anything from the first tier is cheap to the point of triviality.  Players could burn virtual piles of money on the launchpad at no real cost. It eliminates that desired feeling of challenge or stake.

On 2/27/2022 at 12:56 PM, SciMan said:

Put a cap on how much you can have in total of any one resource at any one time, with the cap being raised as the player progresses thru the game.
In this case, I'm counting Money as "just another resource".

This seems likely. I'm imagining giant fuel tanks and money silos on the periphery of KSC. Spend tech points to upgrade them or build more. These resource containers refill themselves automatically over time, somehow. Likewise for colonies, except you either have to deliver the resources or use ISRU.

Automatic income is not something that appeals to me, but I expect it to happen anyway. Game series always lean towards casualization, never the reverse.

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