Budget in career mode

[Algiark]

With career mode more or less in place, the next step in it should be obvious: budget. How do you think earning and spending money in career mode will be or should be like? Something like Mission Controller mod would be a good benchmark, but I think it could use a little more depth. Maybe you can do some sort of deal with parts manufacturer or buy parts in large amounts to get a discount? A maintenance cost for active crafts that gets larger the farther they are? Hiring and training Kerbals for particular skills?

[GavinZac]

I think Squad should avoid trying to 'earn' money directly as this will lead to grinding and 'gaming' the system.

I think they should, alongside 'Science', add a 'prestige' total. Unlike Science, prestige is not directly spent; but it can go up and down.

While Science gives you points for... doing science, prestige could be earned by achievements. The level of 'prestige' you have directly affects the amount of money you can spend per mission (a running total can be kept, but running one expensive emission would not affect another, cheaper mission in terms of a zero-sum total).

So to increase your budget-per-mission, you can do things like:

• Go above the atmosphere +1,000
  
• Take interesting screenshot/'photo' +1,000
  
• Go to orbit +10,000
  
• Go to orbit around the Mun +20,000
  
• Land something intact on the Mun +100,000
  
• Land Kerbals on the Mun +1,000,000
  
• Other Planets +3,000,000
  

etc.

You can lose prestige, and thus get lower funding, by things like:

• Destroy a craft with no science return -20,000
  
• Kill a Kerbal -100,000
  
• Damage a KSC facility -100,000
  

What this does is:

• Reward you for incrementally achieving milestones, rather than getting a load of science by just blasting something into solar orbit and transmitting it back at different stages to get lots of science.
  
• Prevent grinding, so that you don't get people having to run missions again and again to save up for a big interplanetary mission
  
• Accurately reflect a government/species-sponsored funding paradigm which is not profit-focused.
  
• Give a reason to bother going to Dres, etc. once you'd maxed out all the science with 2 or 3 planets.
  
• Give an opportunity for collecting achievements and screenshots/photos in a 'gallery' to help personalise the game for each player.
  

The other factor apart from vehicle construction is astronauts, which don't do much yet. I'd like to see, alongside courage and bravery, two more attributes: Science and Prestige.

A percentage of science earned by a Kerbal on a mission is added to his total; he gets some of the science for ship-wide experiments, and all of the science from his EVA reports and soil samples and other future EVA experiments. After a (relatively low) amount of science, the Kerbal can be assigned a 'Mission Science Specialist' role; this means that the Kerbal will be a specialist scientist who gets ALL of the science from a mission; that is, if Jeb and Bill go up, and Bill is set as a specialist, he gets all the science points. This makes Bill more valuable more quickly, and gives you a reason both to send him into space and to keep him alive.

Having earned that science, Bill now needs something to do with it, otherwise it's just an arbitrary number like Courage and Stupidity. Well, one issue we have at the moment is that there are not many science experiments, and as such they are all a bit overpowered to make up for it. Having a Kerbal with a high Science score on board should unlock 'new' experiments on the same science equipment parts. That is, with just Jeb on board, there would only be one right-click option for science; with Dr. Bill on board, there could be lots. This means we can earn more from science, but also means that science experiments can start off worth a bit less; at the moment it's possible to max out the research tree within a few hours of playing. This would make it harder to do that, and give Dr. Bill value and purpose. An alternative, if that's too difficult to code, is to just simply make the same experiments worth more when run with a better scientist on board.

What about poor Jeb, non-specialist? Well, astronauts should also get a percentage of the prestige points towards their score. Completed a docking? +1000 prestige for Bill and Jeb. Now we can set Jeb as our Mission Commander, since Bill already has his role. All of the prestige points will now go to Jeb; earned in the usual way. Again, Jeb becomes more valuable and gives us a reason to send him up and to bring him back safely. Jeb can also earn some individual Prestige points like Dr. Bill can: prestige for time spent in EVA, prestige for fixing parachutes, landing gear and solar panels; prestige for planting a flag, etc.

What can we do with Jeb's prestige points? Well, what does having an expert pilot do? Makes it easier to fly the craft. Some ideas for this are things like better indicators: radar altitude, docking alignment indicators, landing prediction indicators, perhaps setting hard limits on things like fuel level (so we don't accidentally burn away the fuel we need for re-entry while trying to dock), or even functions that currently are the preserve of MechJeb like hovering or rendezvous maneuver-node calculating (this will make it both easier, if a player is very good at everything *except* hovering, so they get punished less for that; and harder: rather than just installing MechJeb, people can work towards getting these functions in a way that suits the game).

I believe this system would deal with budgets in a way that keeps the game fun, and give astronauts a purpose beyond planting flags.

Edited October 28, 2013 by GavinZac

[vexx32]

That is probably one of the best budget-related suggestions I've ever heard. It would, of course, take some testing and tweaking to get right, but that sounds like a solid way to go.

[Merinsan]

I agree with all that you've said, except losing prestige for destroying craft. Obviously you want some sort of penalty for destroying an important craft, but I frequently destroy craft intentionally, as I don't want to keep junk floating around. Keeping space clean should count in some way, and it seems to conflict with this idea. I don't have a solution, but this needs to be thought about.

[GavinZac]

I agree with all that you've said, except losing prestige for destroying craft. Obviously you want some sort of penalty for destroying an important craft, but I frequently destroy craft intentionally, as I don't want to keep junk floating around. Keeping space clean should count in some way, and it seems to conflict with this idea. I don't have a solution, but this needs to be thought about.

Note that I said without getting science; or perhaps achieving something. Really this limits it to anything that fails almost immediately, or that you've done so many times that you're getting 0 science for it. If you're de-orbiting a station that has done science, you don't lose anything; if your de-orbiting or destroying lower stages of a craft you don't lose anything. Regardless, the penalty would be a fraction of that of losing a Kerbal or damaging something that would otherwise be permanent. a key point to KSP is never discouraging trying; this would be a minor penalty to dissuade people from spamming launches for small amounts of prestige or something. In reality, with the Terminate button and the 'revert to launch/vab' buttons, it likely wouldn't get much use anyway.

[Deathsoul097]

Jeezus, who are you!? That is freaking amazing!

IM CALLING YOU OUT HARVESTR! IMPLEMENT THIS NOW!!!!!!

Seriously though, you must have spent a long time on that, GavinZac. I'm impressed.

[GavinZac]

Jeezus, who are you!? That is freaking amazing!

IM CALLING YOU OUT HARVESTR! IMPLEMENT THIS NOW!!!!!!

Seriously though, you must have spent a long time on that, GavinZac. I'm impressed.

Cheers. It would require a lot of playtesting though to get balances right; with two limiting factors (science and budget) it could be easy to get worked into a corner. If there's enough variety in things to do, though, it should be possible for any player to find something to keep themselves progressing.

[Sathurn]

I like the idea of prestige, but I do want to add on comment:

Revert a mission: lose 1% of your prestige. It would be hard to balance. High enough it is real, but low enough we can still launch "test" missions because we are too lazy to run the numbers manually.

[AngelLestat]

Yeah I like GavinZac idea, the thing that I do not understand very well what is the difference between prestige and budget? Becouse they are directly related.

I think that once a budget system is implemented they need to change how science works.

Right now unlock an extra tank size doing science is silly, science needs to represent better engines (higher isp), lighter materials, reduce on costs to old materials, new parts in the case that is a new way to do science or new technologies.

Becouse the economic is the thing that would restrict the size of your craft.

[GavinZac]

a

Yeah I like GavinZac idea, the thing that I do not understand very well what is the difference between prestige and budget? Becouse they are directly related.

With a plain budget, money will accumulate over time*, or completely run out and stop the game; plus it feels wrong to get arbitrary amounts of money for things which don't actually make a profit, like going to the Mun.

With the prestige system, money would not accumulate over time, rather the better your prestige, the more you can spend each individual launch. The player should never be discouraged from trying another, slightly or wildly different rocket, which is the most fun factor of KSP.

Having prestige instead of money also ties into the 'achievement' factor in both creating a scoreboard or objectively comparing achievements, and in giving our individual Kerbonauts a little bit more of history, prestige and personality.

* This might seem like a good thing. It's not. Imagine yourself 10,000 kerbmarks short of that last engine you need. In order to get it, you launch 10 crappy little satellites, grinding out some money doing non-fun things so that you can later do fun things. This makes a bad, grindy game. Much better to motivate you to achieve something, that will semi-permanently provide you with the prestige you need to say to the Kerbal Government: we put a man in orbit, we deserve that funding to do even greater things!

Edited October 28, 2013 by GavinZac

[SuperWeegee4000]

This really ought to be in .23. The next big chunk of career.

[maro]

Maybe you can do some sort of deal with parts manufacturer or buy parts in large amounts to get a discount?

With subassembly now functional one way to do that would be to buy a allready designed stage or assembly cheaper each time it is used then separate parts.

You have then to decide if you by allredy used/testet but probably not as modern design but a lot cheaper then a new design. And it should get cheaper each time used - lets say 5% with a bottom at 65% from its original price.

So first time you fly it would cost 1000, second time 950, third time 902, 857, 814, 773, 735, 698, 663, from no. 10 onwards it would cost 650 each time....

For the career mode i would like to chose "manned" or "unmanned" from the beginning - or - instead of small part sets group them in tier-groups from 1 to 10 or 15. And one can cose parts whatever one want out of the open tier groups instead of such sets. Think it would be more difficult for unexperienced players but one has to make well prepared decissions what parts to chose.

[giltirn]

GavinZac's idea is a very interesting alternative, I would also love to see the devs consider something like this.

[Pulstar]

This really ought to be in .23. The next big chunk of career.

It is not going to be in 0.23, HarvesteR actually said that during an interview on bigsushi.fm from 5 days ago. Originally he planned to focus on budgets, money and the economy, but the idea now is to polish up science, fixing the obvious issues with it and fleshing out the related mechanics more so that the system is as complete as it possibly can be at this stage of development. So budgets will be in 0.24 probably. Why? Well he said that science polishing is not the only thing that will be in 0.23, he did say that a feature that kept getting pushed back too much will be the other focus of 0.23 development (not resources).

Maxmaps or C7 also mentioned in the last squadcast that the next update will take a bit longer to develop than 0.22 IIRC. This is probably something that needs to be done now so that it doesn't mess up balancing the economy when costs and income get added. My guess is it will be re-entry heat and possibly an aerodynamics rework since those will change how we build crafts a lot, and such a change would require a part cost or income re-balancing if it was added after an economy. But that's just speculation on my part, there could be some other feature that got delayed a lot and is needed now that I may not know about. A dev blog entry will be posted sometime soon detailing what the focus of 0.23 will be so we'll find out soon enough, either via it or via the weekly.

Either way it is important to consider that if a major new addition that changes how we build rockets happens, it will result in having to re-balance the economy. It would be best if loose end features that would require a complete economy overhaul get added first.

[AngelLestat]

a

With a plain budget, money will accumulate over time*, or completely run out and stop the game; plus it feels wrong to get arbitrary amounts of money for things which don't actually make a profit, like going to the Mun.

With the prestige system, money would not accumulate over time, rather the better your prestige, the more you can spend each individual launch. The player should never be discouraged from trying another, slightly or wildly different rocket, which is the most fun factor of KSP.

Having prestige instead of money also ties into the 'achievement' factor in both creating a scoreboard or objectively comparing achievements, and in giving our individual Kerbonauts a little bit more of history, prestige and personality.

* This might seem like a good thing. It's not. Imagine yourself 10,000 kerbmarks short of that last engine you need. In order to get it, you launch 10 crappy little satellites, grinding out some money doing non-fun things so that you can later do fun things. This makes a bad, grindy game. Much better to motivate you to achieve something, that will semi-permanently provide you with the prestige you need to say to the Kerbal Government: we put a man in orbit, we deserve that funding to do even greater things!

Ok, now I understand, it seems I dint read your first post very well.

Is a great idea, but I dont know.. It seems like you are missing the oportunity to take advantage of other ways to improve the gameplay using money.

For example:

-You can have a list of works/task to do from the private sector, like put some satellite in certain orbit. And gain extra money with that.

In that way encourage you to build a reusable rocket to put payloads in orbits. Maybe you need 3 different versions depending the payload.

And if you recover the parts, is money that back to you to be used in the next mission.

But if you always start with a fix amount of budget, what is the advantage to make a reusable rocket or shuttle?

-You can build a space station just to be used like private turism and get extra money from that, moving turist up and down.

-You can build a space solar farm with solar cells and sell that energy to kerbin.

I guess the prestige has to symbolize how big is the budget that you can ask for certain mission, so if your prestige level is high you had more chances to be approved. Also can simbolize like you said a extra certain amount of money for each mission.

With subassembly now functional one way to do that would be to buy a allready designed stage or assembly cheaper each time it is used then separate parts.

You have then to decide if you by allredy used/testet but probably not as modern design but a lot cheaper then a new design. And it should get cheaper each time used - lets say 5% with a bottom at 65% from its original price.

So first time you fly it would cost 1000, second time 950, third time 902, 857, 814, 773, 735, 698, 663, from no. 10 onwards it would cost 650 each time....

For the career mode i would like to chose "manned" or "unmanned" from the beginning - or - instead of small part sets group them in tier-groups from 1 to 10 or 15. And one can cose parts whatever one want out of the open tier groups instead of such sets. Think it would be more difficult for unexperienced players but one has to make well prepared decissions what parts to chose.

mmm dunno.. I guess the game need to encourage the player to design new stuffs. After all the game key feature is not the missions, is the design.

Originally he planned to focus on budgets, money and the economy, but the idea now is to polish up science

I dont know how he can focus in science and not in economics. They need to be related.

For example economic is the thing that needs to limit how big are the craft that you do. Not the science!

resource mining, science and economic system is something that needs to be planned all at the same time. Becouse they are related.

Edited October 28, 2013 by AngelLestat

[Pulstar]

I explained why HarvesteR and squad probably decided to focus on that first, re-balancing the entirety of the economy (costs for over a hundred parts plus income values on all the things that would give you money) every time you add a new system that radically changes craft designs would take too much time. Better do those systems before the economy, then do the economy once and properly with only minor tweaks. Less time wasted on balancing everything, more time to work on new stuff that needs to be implemented. Yes, they should design them at the same time more or less in the aspects of how they will interact, but implementing everything at the same time would be both troublesome for balance as systems would keep changing and evolving all the time requiring co-dependent systems to be rebalanced.

I think that also explains why they did science in 0.22 rather than budgets and missions, because balancing money income, costs and rewards when you don't know what crafts the player will be able to build at what stage, would be kind of like drawing a map of place you never been to or saw even just on pictures without really knowing what the terrain there looks like. Still those are just my words and not theirs and possibly they had other reasoning.

Edited October 28, 2013 by Pulstar

[tdc7]

GavinZac's idea is great and would fit well with the game.

As for the money part, I think it would be interesting to see a feature that allows the community members to act as the "private companies". Where they are able to purpose missions/challenges that the player can download into their game and complete to earn money. There could be a weekly or bi-weekly download for the mission set that the community has developed for that particular time. The missions would be classified by objective/payload type, risk factor, prestige level, and reward. There would have to be a standard in place to determine the difficulty level and amount of money rewarded for completion to keep the missions fair. The player would only be able to take on the mission that fall into their prestige level. As their prestige level grows they are able to unlock the higher risk missions.

I know this would be require more resources from Squad in order to manage the community created missions for download. But it could add extra variety to the game that involves the community generated content. Another issue, that could arise is that since it would be dependent on community driven content, there is the possibility of a slowdown of complete halt in new missions purposed at certain times.

[GavinZac]

Is a great idea, but I dont know.. It seems like you are missing the oportunity to take advantage of other ways to improve the gameplay using money.

For example:

-You can have a list of works/task to do from the private sector, like put some satellite in certain orbit. And gain extra money with that.

In that way encourage you to build a reusable rocket to put payloads in orbits. Maybe you need 3 different versions depending the payload.

And if you recover the parts, is money that back to you to be used in the next mission.

But if you always start with a fix amount of budget, what is the advantage to make a reusable rocket or shuttle?

-You can build a space station just to be used like private turism and get extra money from that, moving turist up and down.

-You can build a space solar farm with solar cells and sell that energy to kerbin.

This is called grinding. Doing small missions over and over to save up to do something that is actually fun. It's the "kill 300 x warthogs to level up!" in every RPG. It's the "beat 50 opponents of any class to unlock the Spider outfit!" in every PvP. It's "bring me 10 mammoth tusks" in Skyrim to get Speech+1. It's lazy, time-spent-for-the-sake-of-it game design. KSP has completely avoided it thusfar because you never had to do anything. As much as possible, that feeling should be retained while still creating a sane progression through the game and sense of achievements that are recognised by the game as much as by your own pride.

Sure, have these missions in there, but you shouldn't have to do something more than once, or do something that is totally repetitive.

I do like the idea of extra prestige for (fully/nearly fully) recovered vehicles though - the more of each spacecraft you bring back, the more money your government are going to let you spend with the understanding that it's not likely to be wasted and quite likely to be reused. If NASA had a reusable spacecraft, they would be in a better position to say "hey, if we can build another one of these for 30% extra investment, it could probably go to Mars".

[konokono]

This is called grinding. Doing small missions over and over to save up to do something that is actually fun. It's the "kill 300 x warthogs to level up!" in every RPG. It's the "beat 50 opponents of any class to unlock the Spider outfit!" in every PvP. It's "bring me 10 mammoth tusks" in Skyrim to get Speech+1. It's lazy, time-spent-for-the-sake-of-it game design. KSP has completely avoided it thusfar because you never had to do anything. As much as possible, that feeling should be retained while still creating a sane progression through the game and sense of achievements that are recognised by the game as much as by your own pride.

Sure, have these missions in there, but you shouldn't have to do something more than once, or do something that is totally repetitive.

I do like the idea of extra prestige for (fully/nearly fully) recovered vehicles though - the more of each spacecraft you bring back, the more money your government are going to let you spend with the understanding that it's not likely to be wasted and quite likely to be reused. If NASA had a reusable spacecraft, they would be in a better position to say "hey, if we can build another one of these for 30% extra investment, it could probably go to Mars".

Semi-agree. However, having to do repetitive things encourages you to set up an infrastructure to make it easy to do those repetitive things. In that sense, I think there *should* be repetitive missions to let you revisit old tasks and see how much easier they are now that you have more advanced parts / are better skilled / have a developed infrastructure.

On the other hand, I do like your suggestion of a "prestige" system that affects your budget per mission as an alternative to grinding. My sense is that a compromise in between would be best. For example, you can get missions from the government or from the private sector. Government missions are funded based on prestige, and can be supplemented by your own cash reserves, are usually science-oriented and don't necessarily earn cash but they do earn a lot of prestige for successful completion. These could even be thought of as the "main quests" in the game. On the side, there are private sector missions that are entirely funded by your cash reserves, usually don't earn much science, but earn cash as a reward. These might be thought of as "side quests". It would make sense for these to be randomly generated as well so you have an endless supply of them.

This way, players who want to focus on the main things like getting to new planets can do so without grinding for money. On the other hand, players who want to earn extra cash or just want a randomly generated task to do, can do so too

[SunJumper]

In terms of money, samples from celestial bodies would bring a chunk of income, either from laboratories (possibly unlocking parts), or by selling them to rich kerbals.

As to budgets and the prevention of grinding, I'd say that it would be up to the player to engineer their crafts to their budgets, and the increments in achievements will reduce possible grinding between missions. Still, if a craft was 200 currency away from being affordable, it would be up to the player to re-engineer their craft to fit within their budget. I'm sure that would be more rewarding than sending twenty probe cores into orbit. Link is SFW!

[nanoa]

Very nice idea, I mean "prestige" as a dynamic upper bound for the total cost of running missions.

But indeed, running a space station, solar farm or mun base or any other kind of infrastructure can as well be rewarded with a big chunk of prestige.

However, the lifting of the upper bound can then be reverted to a lower level if the infrastructure is destroyed or has no longer kerbals in it, to motivate keeping things running.

[Tw1]

I agree, some sort of prestige system could be good. Though it would be hard to set up. For example, how do you tell the difference between accidentally breaking something and clever use of lithobraking, because you forgot a decoupler? It could be simple, relating to number of deaths, returns, science obtained, amount explored, and a few other things. Adding life support need will make rescue missions and back up systems important.

Though if done clumsily, it could push everyone towards a certain play style. Should the game do this? Personally, I think not. I'd prefer it to be open to many styles- so you can focus on the Mun for ages, and not feel pressured to move on. Intrigue can lead, rather than a desire for points, and money.

I advocate the budget per ship approach, but it has its limitations. I'd like to toss another idea in to be discussed.

Though your budget is being limited per flight, it still is, in a way, unlimited. You can easily launch tens of little rockets, and dock them together in orbit to make one big vessel. If you had the funds to make so many little rockets, why couldn't you fund the one big rocket? That doesn't make sense.

Perhaps, a way to resolve this, yet avoiding the need to earn money directly, would be to limit the amount of launches per year.

This could be interesting. Perhaps if you don't use up all the budget for one build, you can add it on to the next. Perhaps could shift the allocated funds from one build to another.

Maybe timewarping a certain extent let's you save up, but too much time without activity, and the funders loose interest.

Earning money from side quests/missions, could be added on to that years budget.

What happens when you go over budget? Does it let you? Perhaps you can draw from next years, at the cost of some prestige for going over budget.

What about SSTOs, and shuttles? Perhaps you could recover them to be stored in a "hanger" (As subassemblies). Such a feature has been suggested many times before.

Perhaps you could have a separate budget for SSTO/Shuttle refueling and repair, so you can use recovered ships again and again.

I think a hybrid system like this could have advantages over both of the other ideas.

TL/DR

Money allocated per year.

Funding levels grow as you achieve, fall when you be horrid, and can be boosted by little missions.

Multiple sub-budgets.

Some flexibility to chose what you do with each budget.

Edited October 31, 2013 by Tw1

[Tw1]

Double post oops.

Edited October 30, 2013 by Tw1