sherkaner

Cool, good recommendations! Are there any contract mods that work especially well with CTT (and maybe other parts sets)?

I've been away from Kerbal for a while now, more or less waiting for the core game to be "done" before sinking more time into a new career. It seems like we are now at at plateau for dramatic Squad-driven development and so I'm ready to dive in. However, I have to admit that the career game still feels like a bit of a placeholder. And as thankful as I am for the wonderful variety of mods out there, slapping on a bunch of mods is no guarantee of playing a career game that has a good progression and flow. So my question to the community is: What options are out there for the player that wants a more satisfying, complete career game that they can be confident will really "work" for them as they sink in tens or hundreds of hours? Of course there are many forms this could take: A career game that sticks very closely to the stock parts and systems, perhaps just modifying the tech tree and maybe contracts A career game that both tech tree/contracts and some additional hand-selected parts mods that "flesh out" the career flow they are going for A career game that seeks to pull in the widest possible variety of parts and systems mods while still providing a well-considered flow of play I'm interested in all three! To me the important thing is knowing going in that somebody has considered a complete career game as a top priority. Perhaps the goal is to create a compelling career that parallels the real development of NASA. Perhaps they want a game that is maximized for fun and feels satisfying taking a player out beyond current technology. I just want to play something more than the stock career which just feels like a sequence of tech nodes and contracts that "work", but that's about it. So, any thoughts? Are there mod packs designed for this kind of thing (SETI comes to mind -- are there others?), or have any of you put together your own collections of mods that you've played through and thought worked elegantly together? What aspects of the career made it compelling to you?

Great set of changes; very excited to have you back into the more aggressive rebalancing again.

Oh nice, sounds worth waiting for.

I know what I'm doing this weekend. Are you expecting any necessary revisions to the SETI CTT for 1.0.4? I wouldn't necessarily expect so, but maybe some of the aero rebalancing changes tweaks you've made?

Well, 1.0.4 was a true bugfix. Should they be more careful with this stuff? Probably, but I can't fault them too much for pushing a fix out quickly. The whole 1.0/1.0.1/1.0.2 thing was a different (uglier) beast, with them wildly pushing the balance of the game around without a lot of thought. But the extra time they spent on 1.0.3 seemed to be them stepping back and saying "okay, no more of that". For a stable base, what you really want is for the fundamentals of the game to not change -- pushing out bug-fix updates isn't anything but positive. But I do understand your frustration. My own heavily modified tech tree mod lasted a single version before I said "nope, don't have the time to update this". Any hope for a little update in the near future with some of the smaller items you've been talking about? I'm really eager to start a new career with the whole heavily-moddied SETI game, with the new 1.0.3 aero and such.

Sorry to hear that you're losing motivation. I agree that there are still a lot of balance issues -- but to me that's exactly where SETI comes in! Especially with the PS4 stuff going on, I wager that there will be an emphasis on stabilizing the fundamentals (and then perhaps adding features cautiously) -- so the kind of stuff that would significantly break SETI may be nearly at an end. Basically I've been kind of hoping that Squad would reach a point where they weren't throwing the game's structure around so much, just so mods like yours could be built up without getting broken. The PS4 move I think will incentivize that, and if Squad is to be believed, I think they'll still have full resources to bug fix and expand things. But in any case I'd love to see you go all out on something like the old BalanceMod, but I'm definitely glad you'll at least keep up SETIctt/contracts/greenhouse.

This looks like an excellent set of fixes and updates -- excited!

So with 1.0.3 out, any goodies forthcoming? Seems like the game is really "settling down" a bit. The 1.0.3 notes look really good, with a nice mix of critical bug-fixes and well-considered game-wide tuning that should stick. It seems like now the focus will be entirely on getting everything over to Unity 5, which I assume should be largely invisible to modders (perhaps aside from UI stuff)? Seems like it might be a better time for SETI now than 0.9/1.0.

That is... pretty underwhelming for pretty much everybody except Squad, who will now have a larger market to sell to. That's great and all, but it's hardly incredible news unless it somehow means a suddenly larger team pushing development faster or something.

Great idea.

I don't think he knows the warm heart behind the gruff Kip exterior like we do...

Yeah, I just barely managed to get my per-part tree within the height limitation and that required a ton of tweaking (and even script-writing for bulk movement of nodes without hand-editing) to get it right.

Just a surface-level look so far, but looks good! I thought about a tree that went both to the left and right to declutter a bit, and seeing your tree, I think it's probably the right choice.

I didn't claim it was perfectly balanced, and I think you're kind of missing the point in me creating it. A lot of those objections specifically have to do with the caveat that you quoted from me yourself: "It's not an endorsement of the parts themselves, which do need to be overhauled as well." What I mean by that is that many of my orderings have to do with some concept of what the parts should be, not what they are, and would require huge retooling of parts specs and contract flow to make sense. So yes, my tree has enormous balance issues; it was meant as a proof-of-concept to spur discussion and hopefully to show that you could create a mostly per-part tree and it wouldn't be a nightmare. Unfortunately some still consider it a nightmare, but I am glad it's spurring some discussion finally. Generally the overall objections seem to be around the idea that a player could end up with "bad" combinations of parts. There is some truth to this -- I just see it as a feature, rather than a bug. I think with some good tutorials, and maybe some trial and error (I don't see why a player's first career has to be guaranteed to be successful), a player should feel empowed by the fact that they selected an R&D path of their own that suited their program and wasn't pre-ordained to guarantee a "good" flow. That said, I do think that if I were to do it over again, I would probably condense some of the nodes a bit. There really isn't a good sensible reason to not group some tanks with some engines for example. I just wanted to start off by "going all the way" on the one-part-per-node path to see how it would go. I think probably the most important thing is keeping totally unrelated parts out of combined nodes. The stock tree is awful about this, and is the source of the biggest headaches I believe. I would like some others to have a look at the SETI tech tree created by Yemo (who posted here recently, but I think was unfortunately run off by the defensive response to his post). It doesn't my any means follow the single-part-node philosophy, but I do think he's managed to pull off a massively improved tree that maintains a more guided flow, but puts things in a much more sensible order. The big thing is that he actually keeps major technologies in a "line" so that the player can guide their R&D path, which is very much along the lines of what we have discussed here. And it's very friendly to mods (which admittedly is a big issue with my tree -- I was very much thinking stock game). Plus, critically, he's actually rebalancing parts to make them work well with the tree and a retooled contract flow, which is absolutely necessary to have a solution that truly works. I'll have to check out OpenTree as well sometime.

I disagree strongly, and I'm not sure what you mean by "bloaty". My understanding is that the reason for those changes to probe cores is totally in support of the career/tech tree flow that Yemo has put together. The player needs to be able to run a number of unmanned sounding rocket type missions at the start of the game, and this requires probe cores with power and communication built-in. Otherwise, players need to start strapping on batteries and antennas, which quickly forces much more complex rocket designs (especially with the new aero). I believe Yemo's intention is to adjust things so that the add-on antennas used by Antenna Range will be more capable than the built-in probe antennas. This way, probes can be effectively used early on, but the more ambitious missions and elaborate communication networks that Antenna Mod is intended for will require using the add-on antennas.

I've been playing stock for quite a long time for three main reasons: It felt like the only way to have achievements and designs feel meaningfully comparable to what others have done Lack of interest in spending time maintaining mods and dealing with any issues arising from their use Belief that Squad would be more focused on creating a broadly balanced and satisfying game than a modder who has his own playstyle and preferences in mind (ie. parts could be overpowered, not fit well with career flow, etc.), and I figured eventually Squad would get around to pulling in the best mod ideas themselves. I have to say though that I've just recently reached the point where I'm giving up on stock play. Basically I've been disappointed that point #3 above hasn't held true -- especially at its 1.0 release status. So I've been really excited by the SETI mod which aims to pull together a wide range of popular mods, contracts, and a custom tech tree into a cohesive, balanced career gameplay experience that looks to be much more well thought-out and diverse than the stock game. I'd be much happier if it were Squad doing this, but I think it's pretty clear at this point that Squad wants to stick to the minimum necessary and leave everything else to modders, so I'm really happy that somebody is taking up the banner of creating a great career game from that platform. Edit: Hah, of course Yemo, the creator of SETI, slips a post in just ahead of mine. That wasn't planned, I swear.

Out of curiosity, have you ever messed with the KerbinSide mod? Any idea how well/poorly it and its contracts might interact with SETI?

Maybe talk to the SETI mod guy about doing something like this as part of SETI-contracts.

I'm curious if you've documented anywhere all of these changes from default behavior. I think it's great, but it's like I almost want a SETI player's guide for how everything should be expected to work. Although really it could just be captured in the descriptions in the tech tree itself possibly, so the game "teaches" you roughly how to use parts as you unlock them.

I was hoping for a little update on a hotfix for the aero issues. Putting time into the game while that's hanging out there seems kind of silly, since rebalancing aero is likely to change design strategies significantly again.

Wow, DMagic looks fantastic, I had totally missed it. I can't wait to play that along with a SETI update that pulls in Antenna Range (not to mention USI life support). The jet engine rebalance sounds good for early game as well. I really like the attention you're paying to having the player go through more early game survey and atmospheric stuff. I tend to think that even for a newbie, this would give them a lot more experience with the game, how the science system works, and train up pilots before throwing them into complexities of reaching orbit and maneuvering there. In any case, it all just sounds fun to me.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. The built-in antennas could be good enough for basically ballistic test rockets and such at the beginning, so players don't have to screw with add-on antennas. But if you want to get into unmanned orbital probes, you'd need the whip antenna at least... and probably start thinking about tracking stations (if you turn line-of-sight on).

Probe cores have built-in antennas? That certainly would be nice if you're using Antenna Range to require an antenna to maintain control over a probe. But no, from what I can tell Antenna Range only messes with the function of the 3 stock antenna parts.

Personally I'd love that, as somebody who would really like to play a game where antennas have some design implications, but still enjoy a kerbal-stock-like experience that isn't over-the-top on realistic depth.