What Is Your Finanical Status?

[nhnifong]

I fear that Squad's idea of 'Veteran' would still be pretty easy. I would like the idea of having a standard difficulty though. How about

Personally, this is how I would set it.

All parts cost 10x more, science payout is 1/3th, reputation payout is 1/10th and is time dependent and scales with the sq root of the number of kerbals on the mission. Deadlines are set to 90% of the expected mission time using a hohmann transfer. In addition, some deadlines would be so short thayou would already have to have your own infrastructure orbiting a planet put there on your own dollar to complete them.

Edited July 20, 2014 by nhnifong

[Starwhip]

Nearly through the tech tree, been to the Mun once, and I've got funds coming out my rear. Almost 2 million now. As it turns out, rescuing Kerbals stranded in orbit, on the way to the Mun to plant a flag with an SSTM is rather profitable.

[KandoKris]

I believe Squad should add just one more cost into there calculations - Time. i.e time is money. As we all know a large part of any space program budjet or any business is HR and Site etc costs and if this were put into the game it would increase the difficulty and discourage people from just launching a trip to jool and focusing only on that mission as "it will be all good once they get back and/or transmit there data.

Somthing like 500 a day with it incraseing slightly as you develope i.e. incrase number of engineers / tracking personnel test pilots funeral expenses etc etc.

[Redwizard000]

Maybe we need a Kerbal Kongress in the game that cuts our funding every year until the program is so useless that we need to rely on someone elses space program to get our astronauts in space! That might add a dash of realism to the game anyway...

In any case, I have barely started .24 and I have tons of cash. However once I start building space stations and overcomplicated interplanetary craft and bases on the mun that don't really pay off anything from a contract but require dozens of launches to build that cash supply might dwindle quickly.

If you just go contract to contract to contract you should always end up making more money than it costs to do the contract. Try doing more sandboxy stuff and don't use quicksaves or flight reverts. When your half million dollar interplanetary monstrosity crashes and burns because it was too top heavy and didn't have enough thrust to make it into orbit the budget will start to hurt a little more.

Oh yeah and the fact that the contracts really don't have much in the way of time limits doesn't help the balance much... I mean a 5 year time limit to plant a flag on the Mun? You should have like a month tops...

[Bloodlance]

Anyone that wants a Kerbal experience with a drop of hardship, you go and push alt+12 => Disable quicksave/load and ALSO Disable rollbacks to launch and or design screen.

IF you do this, then its optimal for the players who want HARDER gaming in Kerbal enviroment.

IF you can load save nonstop, then is it a suprize ??? that you swim in funds.

THINK, before talking, thanks.

( this not directed to anyone, just a post about how to make the game better and to ask people to stop and think, if you have 0% chance of loosing anything is it a suprize that you gain funds until you have "too much" ).

Edited July 21, 2014 by Bloodlance

[regex]

After three and a half Earth days in-game I have about 720k, just blew @200k on a lander for Duna and I'll probably be spending a similar sum on a "Grand Biome Tour" of Minmus. Reusable spaceships are for suckers, it's so easy to make cash you might as well build big.

[PlonioFludrasco]

Sent Jeb to the Mun, and never worried about Funds.

I'm not planning to take him back because I'm continuously being offered contracts about science and flags on the Mun.

[prophet_01]

I think there should be something that cuts down the outcome of science and plant flag contracts as long as u hafe someone there to do it right away. U simply shouldnt get payed equally for 10 sec of waiting to load compared to an hour of gameplay

I also like the idea of shiping generated experiments to places far away.

[Rainbowtrout]

Quite well. On my .24 career save, after a few launches, I'm reaching past 100K.

[Crown]

I fulfilled about 15 contracts and I am at about √700'000. Those two "Test Ionic Engine in orbit" gave me a bunch of √, but I transferred a career save from 0.23.0 where I had already unlocked about half the tech tree, so it wasn't that hard in the beginning.

[DevoidLight]

I believe Squad should add just one more cost into there calculations - Time. i.e time is money. As we all know a large part of any space program budjet or any business is HR and Site etc costs and if this were put into the game it would increase the difficulty and discourage people from just launching a trip to jool and focusing only on that mission as "it will be all good once they get back and/or transmit there data.

Somthing like 500 a day with it incraseing slightly as you develope i.e. incrase number of engineers / tracking personnel test pilots funeral expenses etc etc.

This is a good idea, but if we were expected to perform other missions while waiting the half a year it takes for interplanetary craft to arrive I really feel that some form of Kerbal Alarm Clock would need to be added to stock. Otherwise monitoring your simultaneous missions would be much too tedious and frustrating.

[LordFjord]

So far I am roughly at 1M funds with maybe two dozen successful missions. My current "prime" Minmus mission ending in a fireball, losing Jeb and his 50k spaceplane, maybe I should have invested a bit into escape systems.

But regarding spaceplanes and being profitable:

- Yes, they work perfectly, but their limited range is an issue. I don't have the parts to build the big ones yet.

-> solution to this "problem": SRBs are really cheap and can easily lob spaceplanes into orbit from a high altitude flight. So yeah, its not SSTO anymore but SRB assisted spaceplanes for me. The SRBs will simply get dropped once they have done their job.

I guess that these will reach quite nice payload fractions while still having a lot of dV left in orbit - basically to go anywhere and bring all the cargo needed for tests.

Why spaceplanes? Cause I love them and they are easier to land back on Kerbin, besides I don't wanna throw away 90% of the funds to "get up there".

[Madrias]

I've had to make two saves for Career mode. My first one, I blew the budget on my first launch and started off badly, and things spiraled downhill fast. My second save, however, is struggling. Mind you, I'm the guy who would rather be flying spaceplanes than rockets, and all the early stuff is, is rockets. So I continually mess up, cause accidents, have staging issues and stuff blows up. I've built more ships to be launched than I've been able to launch because of the lack of cash.

I think Career mode is hard enough for a new guy, and even though I've played KSP since 0.17, I'm not the master wizard of rockets, either. Once I unlock basic spaceplane tech ("if" might be more appropriate than "once," though...) I'll be okay, but until then, I'm in a deep budget crunch.

[falconek]

10 millions after some orbital stuff, one landing on Mun (one biome visited) and one landing on Minmus (3 biomes visited). Currently I'm preparing for an Eve/Gilly and Duna/Ike missions.

This all wouldn't be possible without Kerbal Engineer and Optimal Rocket Calculator (http://garycourt.github.io/korc/) thanks to which my designs are always perfect and low cost. Also I'm using "return to launch pad" and "return to hangar" options for "testing" so my test and research costs equal zero. I predict, that my Duna ship will cost around $50000.

However, back when I started playing KSP, my first Mun landing took me 20 or 30 attempts of "go to moon -> lithobrake -> repeat" (I didn't know that quick saves exist) so I understand reasoning behind current game ballance.

[Crusher8000]

600 000 after a fair amount of missions but without rewinding so every mistake is permanent. I just managed to send my first probe to Duna and Ike and that mission was a matter of life or death when it came to my space program because all my funds when into it. Thankfully I succeeded in several contracts and I now I have 600 000.

[Brapness]

After exploring the Kerbin system, I'm looking at about 1.5 million funds. That includes 4 or 5 rockets lost due to glitches (I seem to be getting the launch kraken a lot more often these days) and one lost because the fuel lines were on backwards.

I've avoided quicksaves and reverting so that I'm forced to pay for my mistakes (or unfortunate circumstances).

[HarvesteR]

It's a good thing if the contracts system is over-rewarding you slightly at the moment. This is what we were aiming for during balance testing actually.

That may sound weird at first, but remember there are other things that will require funds, which are still not being accounted for. Hiring/assigning crews, R&D tech purchasing, and some other stuff that I'll talk about later.... Those things will all require funds in the near future, so if you've got a surplus now, that's a good thing in the long run.

And in any case, even without these upcoming cash drains, this is the first iteration of budgets in the game, and we much preferred to err on the side of caution here and over-reward a bit, than leave you stranded without means of continuing as a consequence of under-rewarding contracts.

We did, IIRC, 5 or more passes over the contract outputs during experimental testing. First to achieve consistency (the earlier versions had some contracts rewarding orders of magnitude higher or lower than the average), and after consistency was reached, we carefully tuned the costs of parts (probably still missed a few, but we did go over hundreds of them), and made sure that if you played it right, cash wouldn't be a restrictive factor.

Game balance is a finicky subject, to say the least, and it's not an exact science. There aren't any calculations or methods you can use to pre-analyze the resulting fun-ness of a game mechanic other than sitting a large group of people down to playtest it, give feedback, tweak something, and repeat until most agree you've got something that works. This is true of any game in fact, but it happens mostly behind closed doors, during early closed beta mostly, and some final adjustments over open beta. In our case, there is no such thing. Our closed testing is to speed up the discovering and fixing of bugs, but the final release isn't really final at all.

We've been following the community closely these last few days, picking up feedback from everyone to see how the balancing is working out. We've seen some players who did get stuck with no cash to continue, and many others who have made enough to not have to worry about it. That's not bad at all from a first iteration.

Cheers

[m4v]

Aye. They seem to get triggered after you've completed the "explore" contracts for the given planet. I guess it's assumed the "explore" contracts can be completed with an unmanned craft.

Which is funny, given that core probes and the 0.625m parts are unlocked some tiers later in the tech tree.

[NoPanShabuShabu]

I've got 5 1/2 mega roots right now, so plenty of cash. What HarvesteR said about starting out the game balance leaning in the player's favor is right on. Better to have everybody swimming in cash and dial it back than to have everybody struggle and get frustrated.

[Lysergic]

Well at first I was drowning in cash. I had visited the mun, minimums, and Ike. And none of this gimmicky multiple flag crap - I don't do any mission that's not a "explore" kind of thing. Or quicksave or revert. But I got greedy. I launched a probe to Moho, a probe to Dres, and a monster 5 probe ship to Jool. I was more or less out of funds. But I had a ton of missions about to make me loaded.

It was not to be.

My Moho probe bugged out - I switched to it, everything that was not the UI went black, so I saved and quit and when I came back the probe was just gone. Same thing happened to the Dres probe. Uhoh. A lot is riding on this Jool monster now.

I get into Jool system. I flub the areobrake and burn some fuel trying not to fall into it's gravity well. And then I realize, somehow, I'm orbiting backwards. Crap crap crap. I squeeze one probe off and land on one of the airless moons. I realize I somehow didn't put decouples on my other probes.

I quit and start a new save.

[Vohjiin]

It only takes that one mishap with Time warp on some of your first missions to set you back..... But because Missions work the way they do you can always get more funds. I would like to see missions where the up front pay is put into the completion fund, and you have to complete them on starting funds (which would obviously be adjusted for this). I feel it's to easy to get emergency funds right now by just accepting a bunch of missions, then completing some of the larger pay out ones, even if you don't complete a few others you'll recoup the cost regardless and you just work your way up from there.

Oh I am a big fan of graphs so hint hint to modders (I lack the time currently) or perhaps I can not spend free time playing KSP and try modding it xD.

[Tortoise]

Right now this is my current funds.

Almost unlocked the whole tech tree and I haven't gone farther than the mun.

[Bloodlance]

old game i had 2.6mil , and it dropped to 1mil when i did my orbital bases to Kerbin and Mun Orbits (vanilla 100%)

new game i have 600k kerbux , and i have used ALT+F12 and disabled quicksave/load and reroll back to launchpad and design screen. So when i leave platform its all or nothing

much more enjoyable that new game. Vanilla is too easy (but i guess its easy for the new players) and the players who want more hardship know how to get it.

[bitbucket]

Sitting on 1.5 million after about 25-30 contracts, and my only foray out of Kerbin orbit was a trip to Minmus that brought back 2000+ science and got me over halfway through the tech tree. Another more exhaustive trip with more experiments should give similar results, and then I can move on to do the same on Mun to finish the tech tree. Then I can start having some real fun.

One thing that's been changed by contracts is that I'm not using "standard" designs; I end up custom-building a ship on almost every launch so that I can fulfill at least one or two contracts on every flight.

[TUFOM]