Pthigrivi

What makes you say that? I mean I certainly think many of the suggestions that would require a total re-write are just not going to happen, nor do I think they're necessary, but there's definitely room left for improvement. Mission planning would be big boost, Kerbal skills above level 3 are obviously unfinished. It would be a real shame after putting in all that effort to upgrade to Unity 5 to just abandon it this point. Development has been slow and new features were deliberately left off the table during the upgrade. Squad is a small company, Im not surprised it takes time. Still progress is happening.

Yeah that would help as well. Another thing you'd need is a somewhat sophisticated alarm clock to keep track of all this stuff. I don't think it would be smart to make the "Build and launch" time advancement automatic as you might blow through intercepts and other things. You'd want to be able to go to a dedicated schedule window and "warp to next alarm" kind of thing. Does it make more sense to just have the reputation hit and funding penalty happen on the contract deadline rather than yearly? It might be easier to scale between long and short missions that way. Jool missions for instance can take multiple years and yearly assessments might get weird with that. So instead maybe when you select the program it might say "Funding: X/month for 6 months. Deadline: 8 months, Y reputation penalty for failure." Also: can we come up with fun names for Kerbal months? Jooltober? Krakenbruary?

I think its challenging, but it could be fun. I know several friends with whom I'd love to do a cooperative build with. Just seeing other people's creations and collaborations interacting would be a blast.

We're you the one who suggested adding a 'simulation' cost (toggleable in settings of course) to reverts and reloads? That was a great idea.

I do like that revamp man. I would add to that list surface features, graphic enhancements, giving some love to the science system, finishing the experience system, adding a main quest and a lot of other stuff before we got a new solar system.

Oh I'd love some kind of KAS integrated for levels 4 and 5. There are a ton of cool things scientists and pilots could do too. Some time ago I also suggested each Kerbal might have a really basic 3-branch skill tree. When they earn levels they can choose to level-up in Piloting, Science, or Engineering. It be really nice for instance to give a level 3 Engineer the basic ability to pilot. At the same time maybe thats a lot of time spent micro-managing kerbals... I guess I could go either way at this point.

So, lets separate one thing out so we can focus on the issue. Let's just say instead of choosing exclusively from procedurally generated contracts there were a set of missions you could always specifically select like Mun Program or Duna Program or whatever. These programs will necessarily come with advances (some basic amount money to build your rocket) and rewards (what you get for completing the mission). Essentially what we're deciding is how should those payments be structured? Should they come in lump-sums (as they are now) or should they be paid out over time? If they're balanced presumably each program will give you something like 1/12th the amount of money it should take to complete it per month so you have to time-warp before you build. Wont players always just time-warp till the end of the year to get the maximum amount of money? Even if you're requiring them to run 3 missions per year they're still sitting around warping for hundreds of days at KSC between missions. They're also time-warping through tech-nodes, building upgrades, maybe even rocket construction? Maybe this appeals to you for role-playing reasons, it sounds like thats what you're doing already, but from a pure gameplay standpoint it is time consuming. Its a lot of extra player time spent managing schedules, entering and exiting buildings, watching the screen flash from day to night for months at a time instead of flying rockets. Maybe its more realistic, but is it really making the game more fun? Does all that time-warping (and totally re-writing the game) really address the central issues plaguing career as it now stands? Though I think the idea could be tidied up by just giving missions funding cut-offs instead of year-end reviews I do think we've boiled things down to the point that we've avoided obvious exploits, which is great! So now it comes down to the basic question Squad was asking back when people wanted KCT to be made stock or when Roverdude was designing the resource scanning system: does it make sense to require players to time warp in principle? Is that really feeding into what makes KSP fun? At what point does the fuss of managing schedules become more distracting and onerous than the lack of realism? Or is that kind of management and planning an important part of understanding space travel? I could see solid arguments either way.

I think it added a bit of helpful nuance. It means we can still discuss things but can (hopefully) try to consolidate repetitive discussions in one thread so they don't clog up the board. This, along with things like military parts should really be listed in a "not planned" section.

So, can a player fulfill one contract and then time-warp a full year's salary out of that? What's the advantage to just getting the money up front? Why add the step of having to time warp for it? Like, it seems to me there are some players who like to engage in a particular style of role playing and want the rules of the game to require everyone else to role-play in the same way. Except the solution seems to be to hide rewards behind a time-warp. What will happen instead is everyone will just time-warp for those rewards and won't do anything else in the meantime.

^Exactly. I do agree flag planting should be removed from XP list, as all it really does is require each Kerbal on a mission to EVA and plant a flag and then remove it, which is a little tedious. Landing on the surface should be sufficient. I also agree there should be some way of leveling up Kerbals in flight. It seems insane that you could send a kerbal on a Jool 5 and they wouldn't level up till they got hime. The general principle that Kerbals gain experience by going places, however, is sound. The trouble with linking XP to field related tasks is that they are easily exploitable and generally not-fun. The IRSU units don't show up till late in the tech tree, so how do you level up Kerbals before that? Fixing things? Repacking chutes? Im instantly envisioning some really tedious strategies where players are repeatedly breaking and repairing tires at KSC to level up their engineers, which sounds terrible. Same with pilots. Are we just logging flight time? Time to put Jeb in orbit and time-warp for a year to max him out. This just kind of fits into the category of things that make a game work. I do think the XP system could use some tinkering and levels 4 and 5 could be filled out with cool skills but ultimately if players aren't being rewarded for going to new places I don't know what the scheme would be.

It would take some work but I agree filling out the worlds with fun things to discover is would be a nice move.

Do we want to do a kind of re-cap to consolidate the scheme here? A lot of solid ideas are floating around at the moment and its hard to gauge overall picture.

Sorry Scruff, things were getting a bit crazy for a bit there, I must have missed your post while I was fighting with whatever weirdness was happening with the quotes haha.

Edit: okay quotes are weird I guess. Manual it is. I blame wumpus for this. Tater Wrote: "I never said one goal per year, I said that goals would have reasonable time constraints. You might pick 5 at once. During Apollo NASA ran Gemini, plus the various lunar probes (related to Apollo, but not manned missions) all while also doing satellites, and BEO probes." Right, but the question is what is the minimum? If your budget is only reset once a year can you just do one little mission and then warp money for year without consequence?

Easy man, Im really am trying to help you flesh this out. The op says "rep slowly drops down" which implies a linear drop in reputation over time. The first I saw mention of yearly assessments was Tater a few hours ago saying "Do something per year" which isn't exactly the same as allocating all rep hits once a year. It just means thats when your budget is adjusted. The distinction matters. I don't expect Squad to abandon career as it stands but if we could work out the details I really do like this as a separate mode of play. Instead of "Sandbox, Science, and Career" Players might chose from "Sandbox, Private Space Company, and National Agency".

Yearly budget assessments would certainly help, but are we really only expecting players to complete one mission a year? That doesn't sound like much of a challenge. We've also traded the the reputation-bleed problem for an opacity problem. It's bad enough right now that Reputation is a black box. We know having it is good, we know it gives us more prestigious contracts, but exactly how much rep we need to earn a given contract is hidden from us and therefore impossible to predict. This is actually half of the "random" contract problem--players don't know what the reputation they're earning is buying them. What yearly budgets based on rep does is to put the budget into that same black box. Say we go to our Programs menu and select a Mun mission and it promises us X rep if we complete it. How much money will that translate into when the next year-end budget assessment happens? Its impossible to know, so players have even less long-term planning power than they do now. I think we can do better than that. It actually makes me wonder if we can't dispense with reputation altogether. I mean programs are self-defined in this paradigm, so you don't need rep for that. If reputation = money then why not just tell people up front how much money they'll get? Why not just tell players "Completion of this mission objective earns X dollars for Y months totaling Z" In fact, you don't even need scheduled budget assessments, just give the rewards cut-off periods. You don't need deadlines either, its just up to you to roll the earnings from your last mission into your next. The one place you still need reputation is if you plan to keep any of Arsonide's careful contract work. I know you guys aren't crazy about them, but a lot of players are. I actually quite like being provided with oddball constraints I might not otherwise have thought of. Just something to consider. What did Mark Twain say? "If I'd had more time I would have written a shorter letter."

I don't think you're getting it. Its not "a few other things", its dozens and dozens of other things. The game doesn't know the difference between "excessive" time warp and necessary time-warp to run a long mission. What you're suggesting is a system thats impossible to scale. Say you want to go to the Mun. For money to matter the game should really only provide you with just enough money to complete the given mission. Lets just say the Mun mission should cost less than 50,000f. So the game gives you a deadline of 6 months and provides you with 10,000f a month. What this means is you have to time warp through 5 months of your deadline in order to have enough to launch the mission and for each of those months your reputation is declining. Fine, you say, once you complete the Mun mission you'll earn all that reputation back and more. But what happens when you want to run a Jool mission? Its going to slowly dole out the amount you'll eventually need to run the mission, then you need to warp to the next transfer window, then you have to warp 3 years while your mission transfers. If you don't run shorter missions in that time-frame you'll be sitting on a million gazillion dollars and all of your reputation will bleed away. You're thinking "whatever, just send a Duna mission in the mean time", but you still have to wait for the Duna transfer window and then 300 days in transit, so that mission must also be filled in with yet smaller missions in between to keep your rep alive. As pointed out in the thread I linked above this adds up to a lot of smaller missions. Striping away the option to do smaller missions doesn't help you in this circumstance, it just makes you #*$&ed. "Do something per year" is not a game mechanic. The game needs to provide players with very clear, scaled expectations and risks and rewards for success or failure. Money needs to be tight or it doesn't matter. You can't require players to time-warp and then penalize them for doing so and expect there to be no consequences. You can't offer up something this vague and just assume it will work and then get annoyed at Squad because they didn't think of it. They have thought about it, which is why the game doesn't work that way. I totally agree there is room for improvement, and including time-based mechanics could be really fun and immersive. Its hard to make it work though, and in the end might honestly be more complicated than its worth. Thats what we're discussing--how to solve these subtle, important details.

The devil is in the details here. The trouble is you can't say you want people to time warp and then punish them for doing so. Rep loss can't happen linearly with time for reasons mentioned here. What happens in practice is players are forced to run huge numbers of short-duration missions, hundreds even, just to keep the lights on while long-duration missions are in transit. This is why we started talking about rep-loss deferrals based on having in-progress flights, so players can time warp when they need to without killing their program. This works for time-warping in transit, but players will still be punished for time-warping to the next transfer window. Its sort of the trick here, and the reason I think Squad hasn't tackled this earlier. What seems simple and perfectly realistic can have big unexpected consequences in practice. Solving these issues isn't trivial, and can lead to solutions even more complicated and baroque than what we already have. I tend to think people play KSP because they like flying rockets, not because they like messing about doing paperwork at KSC, so in general the most straight-forward, simple solutions are almost always best whether they are strictly realistic or not.

Hey @Veeltch lets continue the time discussion here. I just don't want to totally blow up Brainlord's spot too much with a dependent issue. I'd actually love for time to work, its just tricky. Yeah what we're trying to prevent is players time-warping to infinite money without cost. So long as they've got a mission in-progress the cost can be deferred. The trick is that right now vessels aren't tied to missions at the time they're launched. The contract just sets up a set of conditions and if any vessel satisfies those conditions the contract is completed. You could of course set things up so vessels are labeled as part of a mission before launch, but Im worried this could get really complicated when docking is involved. There is however already a system set up for satellite delivery, so it seems to me if you could get any vessel to satisfy a condition like 'on Jool intercept course' this could satisfy one of your steps. If later that mission failed to satisfy other conditions like 'landed on laythe' the reputation cost could be incurred then. It still leaves the question of transfer windows though. They wouldn't have vessel on an intercept course so they'd still be vulnerable to the reputation hit, and it wouldn't really be fair to penalize players for time-warping to the next window.

Sorry bro, Im really not trying to be difficult, just trying to be helpful and offer feedback. Feel free to ignore the latter part of that post, only the second paragraph addresses your specific proposal. A lot of people have suggested similar ideas, some very recently. Its been an ongoing question and kind of spilled over here but this is your show man. I promise, Im not 'assaulting' your ideas, I hope it doesn't sound that way. Just trying to think through how this would effect gameplay for most players.

Its true, I did hijack your thread a bit, sorry about that. Its because your suggestion depends upon a larger discussion we've been having about how time-based mechanics could be integrated. Your argument that R+D should take time is very similar to arguments others have made for rockets, building upgrades, and budgets to take time--that it doesn't make sense that these things would happen instantly and its breaking your sense of immersion. I understand your concern and get why you feel this way. My argument isn't that time-based mechanics are bad, in fact I agree with you and Tater that they would make a clever dynamic in the game. My point is that making these mechanics both meaningful and stable is surprisingly difficult. If time has no cost and is detached from an incentive process then it is an element of role playing and not an actual game mechanic. Time warping through an R+D node is trivial because in KSP time is trivial. So long as your ships are in stable orbits you can time-warp infinitely and nothing bad will happen to you. Time, in this way, doesn't matter. Let me try to be specific about what the problem is: Many players like to invent stories and role-play through career. For some this includes administrative tasks, and when those tasks don't fit their stories it breaks immersion for them. The trouble is there are many ways to role-play and many ways to interpret stories. Some players like to focus on big Jool motherships or character dynamics between kerbals or grand head-cannon stories about rival nations. Its not fair or smart to tailor the game to a specific way of role-playing. What matters, ultimately, are incentives. Right now getting new parts is the central incentive of career mode. When a player has clicked "research" on a tech node and are presented with a choice of launching an obsolete rocket or simply time-warping through the research phase almost all players will time-warp every time. They won't even think about it. The lure of new parts is just too strong to allow them to busy themselves while they wait. This is, counter-intuitively, a disincentive for obeying time as an element of role-play. You haven't added a new dynamic for them, you've just required them to exit the R+D facility and time-warp through dozens of nodes. The reason they won't have to think about it is because time has no cost. If, as Tater suggests, time is a currency, it is a free currency. The only way to prevent players from time-warping every time is to give time an in-game cost, and this is where the real challenge lies. This is mostly for @Veeltch. Say the cost is your reputation decreases over time if you don't complete missions. What does this look like in practice? Lets take a look at a typical mid-game career: - Player launches a probe destined for Jool - one way duration 3 years. ---> If the player time-warps three years their reputation will collapse, so they must run shorter missions to fill in while they wait. They also can't time-warp to the next Duna window for the same reason. - Player launches a Minmus mission - round trip 15 days. ---> Same problem. - Player launches a Minmus mission - round trip 15 days. ---> Same problem. - Player launches a Minmus mission - round trip 15 days. ---> Same problem. - Moho window opens up. Send probe to Moho - one way 100 days. ---> Same problem. - Player launches 4 more Minmus missions. ---> Same problem. - Player launches a Duna mission - one way 300 days ---> Same problem. - Player launches 20 consecutive minmus missions. - Duna mission arrives. You would have to repeat the above 4 more times before the Jool probe even arrived if you wanted to prevent reputation collapse. Encouraging players to run multiple missions is one thing, but this cannot possibly be right. Taters suggestion of tightening up contract deadlines also fails to incentivize because players can just wait to accept contracts until after they've time-warped through administrative tasks. Again, there could be clever ways around this. There might be some way of making time meaningful that also doesn't require players to run dozens of tedious time-filler missions. I just haven't seen one described yet.

Right, but you also don't build spaceships by snapping on and pulling off parts. Some elements of realism are helpful for making a game fun, like physics. Other things from real life don't actually translate well into a fun game experience, like filling out budget proposals. No matter what there's going to be a level of abstraction going on for no other reason than to simplify things and let players have fun. Little jags in realism like instant research don't bother me more any more than clicking "launch" and having a fully assembled spacecraft on the launchpad. It just speeds things along so I can focus on whats fun. Yeah, ships become obsolete as you progress, but I think adding the step of having to time warp through a research node changes that much. For time to be fun, for it to be a real challenge and not just a an extra thing you have to click, it needs to be involved in some way with strategy. A player would have to weigh in their minds the cost of time warping. Life support would do it because you'd have to worry about your little duders running out of food. If you build your ships right however you could do things like put a station up in orbit and then time-warp a probe out to Jool no problem. In these cases though time warp is earned through problem solving, and doesn't amount to being called away from your mission to attend to administrative tasks. There are a ton of time-based KCT like mechanics that could be interesting if an underlying dynamic could be established, but this is harder to balance than you think.

Veeltch I will fight you. Haha jk yeah I think we broadly share misgivings about how career works now. I do like your idea for programs, I think the solution I wrote in the rethinking career thread splits the difference there. Regex also suggested time mechanics in which a monthly budget was just a pool that fills and then caps to prevent infinite money. This is interesting too, but still feels like modular infinite money in that you can send up as many launches as you wish so long as they are under the cap. It also seems to preclude roll-over, which means there's no way to strategically 'save up'. Not sure how a similar concept could be applied to research times though. I know what you mean about sending up lots of concurrent missions. Its what I do because I like managing complicated systems, but I worry that outright precluding one-off missions is maybe too severe for players who like to focus on one big mission at a time. Its a tough balance, offering sensible constraints while still allowing for broad diversity of play styles. Also sorry Brainlord we totally hijacked your thread haha

Yeah we've chatted about this before but the problem with time based mechanics (and the reason they don't exist already) remains the ability to time warp. If you can just time warp through something then all it adds is minutia. What players will do is set something to research, go outside, time warp, then go back in. You've added fuss, but not a real mechanic. For time to matter it needs to have a cost, which tends to incur other problems. You can for instance have reputation whittle away over time, but then when players want to time warp their probe to Jool they find that all of their reputation has been erased en-route. I understand the impulse, and Im not saying its impossible, but until we have another time based cost like life support I just don't see how it works. I do agree with you that science could use some work, and honestly would love for time to become an active consideration in Kerbal, its just tougher to manage than it seems at first.

How did this work out for you? I had the hardest time maintaining lift with almost any atmosphere.