career difficulty over time ?

[Nemrav]

yes, remove grind, redo science, make better contracts (blah), here's what I think career is really missing....

Making the difficulty scale over time....

Currently unlike most games, Ksp's career mode starts the hardest and ends the easiest as opposed to the traditional opposite. Most games have a scaling system where, the player starts small and gets bigger, better things (this does happen in career) but... Over time, the challenges the player is presented with get more difficult faster then the player gets his new trinkets that makes it easier... (this part is not in KSP)

The contracts kind of do this (which is why they are probably less annoying than science) but not enough to motivate the player to push through a tough situation.. You can just x away contracts until an easy one pops up.

The only current proposal I've seen to this has been rival agencies (who would step up their game to make the career harder as the player got new parts and such, the player would have to do more impressive feats with less than them..).

Any other ideas ? Maybe since the failure is reputation based, we could have something where the agency needs to keep public interest in the space program to prevent itself from being shutdown by ..... somebody....

[tater]

There is not really a way around this. The difficulty in terms of operating spacecraft is fixed, only the dv requirements really change.

A space race would also, obviously be cool, but it doesn't really scale difficulty with ability, either.

[WanderingKid]

There are three vectors I can see challenging a player in KSP. Currently, none of them really exist.

1) Time challenges.

Currently the only time challenge is the transfer burn times for efficient rendezvous with other orbital bodies. These optimal burn times can be ignored with enough dV.

There is no other cause for time to be considered, in stock. TacLS gives you a realistic issue for your crews, but that's self-imposed at launch time, it's not an external challenge of the game itself. Again, with enough dV, you can overcome it by over-supplying any particular mission.

Because there's no pressure, this is not a challenge vector currently. Even an 'Oh My God the Asteroid is coming on x date!' type of pressure might be useful. However, that's a Kerbin SOI level of difficulty, and not solar system level.

2) Knowledge vs. Execution

Similar to Dwarf Fortress, once you know what you're doing, the challenge is in execution. However, execution does not ramp up in difficulty to proceed. If you take, for example, a side scrolling shooter, then the difficulty is increased against this by adding more versatile enemies, bullet storms, etc. KSP does not lend itself to this type of challenge vector. Unless you have invading aliens or something...

Knowledge gained is kept, and once learned doesn't need to be applied much differently at the end than at the beginning. Land once on Mun and Kerbin and you have the basic knowledge tools you need for landing anywhere (besides on Jool). While it may require different variables (Eve's gravity vs. Gilly's, for example, require a different approach) the execution method doesn't really change as a challenge, unless it's self imposed to "Do It Better".

3) Limited Resources

This is currently a vector in career mode, and is the cause of the 'grind'. Science, similarly, is also a vector in this category. Additional to this is the need to upgrade your buildings at the KSP to get access to useful tools and/or large enough ships for the dV required. All of these force you to perform tasks with less than optimal setups. However, this challenge is avoided due to contract declines and contract churn.

Said declines and churn however are necessary, as the contract system is far too variable and procedural to allow for it to be enforced. I offer you the following scenario: All you have is part test contracts worth less than the part costs you. You have three satellite missions and they're all at Tylo and Lathe, and a good transfer window won't open up for 2 years.

Unless the contract system is made less procedural and more coherent and consistent, it's not a valid vector to enforce as the only path to the challenge.

A similar idea to this is the competing agencies, causing either auctioning of contracts for lowest bid or competition of the limited resource of a contract pool.

[Francois424]

I'm pretty sure the scaling in difficulty can be done eventually with new planets/moons or reworking the current Kerbol System.

Most of the ships I have build on Kerbin and launched had about 8k dV. If I tried really hard, I could do 15-18k, but my system would lag and I hate lag. Ramp difficulty up, I had to learn to Dock and refuel. Still, we need destinations that makes Moho a joke. I mean REALLY far stuff that would warrant using Jool as gravity assist or serious ship engineering to pull off.

Case and Point :

Jupiter is 778.547.200 km from the sun, the Earth is 151.000 km.

Saturn 1.433.449.370 km

Uranus 2.870.671.400 km

Neptune 4.498.542.600 km

Pluto 5.874.000.000 km

Now if Jool is 68.773.560 km, then the next planets could be :

126.629.803

253.592.879

397.397.756

518.904.593

the farthest one is ~7,5 times further away than Jool. If we say 3k dV for single trip to Jool, it becomes 22'500 dV for a simple go at that farthest planet. It makes up for an interesting challenge (especially I you make that last planet have 5 moons like Pluto, that makes stuff to do once there).

Add in solar panels being ~56 times less efficient (distance exponent 2), even if you do not play with Life Support, that's quite the challenge. And that's just a logistic challenge. Don't forget EVE for now... it's hard, and doesn't get much love as a result.

Now if our "future Pluto" is a large planet with 5 tough moons to get to (weird inclination, super dense atmosphere, etc)... imaging a tougher Jool-5 but with the above difficulties.

And don't get me started about having a "Halley's Comet" that orbits closer than Moho and slightly less far than our to-be Neptune analog. That would also pose quite the challenge to intercept and land. And it would be fun !

well, these where my thoughts on the subject, enjoy =)

[Bill Phil]

Maybe have nuclear reactors for power out there?

[tater]

Even RTGs fall off over their flight times, but yeah, reactors would be better.

I agree on the distances, but it's not "more difficult" It's simply "more throw weight." If you can rendezvous in Kerbin orbit, then building a ship, fueling it, sending fuel ahead for refuel around body X is all complex, and fun, but not "more difficult" in the sense I think we mean. This is particularly true given that the player does everything. Adding "management" difficulties isn't really a thing, as you cannot delegate. They could add colonization, or something, but those 100 flights… you have to fly them yourself.

Honestly, in my limited experience the best difficulties I have had has been when I have either forgotten something critical on a craft, or I have broken something that turned out to be important. Adding failures would help, but you'd see the same issue where such failures are worse early in the game due to fewer ways to deal with them.

[Capt Snuggler]

Two words:

Life Support

If crewed missions required life support, the difficulty would be staggering by the end game without appropriate use of technologies.

One life support resource would do it. it could be measured in "mission days" so the player can clearly see how long the crew have until they "go to sleep".

probes and short duration crewed missions are more common as they are much more logistically forgiving.

eg:LKO stations, Apollo style mun missions as opposed to the nasa design reference mission.

the player will need to focus on researching insitu resource utilization and life support recycling technologies to be able to achieve long duration missions with acceptable mass.

ultimately, more efficient life support tech and better propulsion will allow for long duration crewed space flight in the late game.

This would mean the outer planets would be very very difficult to visit with a crewed ship. It would lots of pre-planning, a complete or mostly compete tech tree and several support/supply missions.

so very difficult but the player should have the necessary skills and knowledge by this point in the game.

Edited March 16, 2015 by Capt Snuggler

[tater]

I already play with LS, and indeed, it changes everything in many ways. That said, again, for multi-flight games, it can possibly be tedious to resupply… you can have many highly skilled (in the new scheme) pilots, but they cannot actually do anything, the PLAYER still flies every single mission, regardless of how routine. Many are against having the kerbals fly themselves, I tend to think it's mandatory if the game wants to pretend to any "management" level of play at all.

I think that in the end it still comes down to how much payload you can give whatever amount of dv, nothing more. It makes long distance missions more complex, but not fundamentally harder. I'm not suggesting that they even should be harder, I'm saying that is the reality of a game that is even sort of realistic. The basic tools are there at the start, and technological improvements make the game easier as time goes on, not harder.

One problem is really that the early game is in fact so easy. When you blow past what should be an incredible accomplishment, landing on the Mun before you've played more than a couple hours, that's a problem. That would really require more data than squad likes to give as well. In the VAB it should show how many hours the batteries will last with minimal systems on at the very least, for example. It's counter-intuitive to make the early game harder, not easier, but I think that spending more time getting ready for the Mun would be a good thing for career (basically wanting a sort of mercury-->gemini-->apollo sort of progression to happen instead of a couple suborbitals to unlock stuff, then an orbital mission, then a Mun landing (which is a fairly normal progression for me, even in an RSS cfg).