Rep, milestones, Contracts and the very first missions

[Mr. Scruffy]

In career mode, you should start with limited funds, no REP and hence no contract offers. Your very first mission should be to achieve a milestone (that is like a permanent contract earning nothing but REP), so you can even get contracts.

And then REP should be used as a currency. In the ´advance´ section of ***-contracts, there should be a negative REP number.

EDIT:

Milestones should be things like:

- altitude records [1]

- speed records in kerbin atmo [1]

- flyby of body x (unmanned/manned) [1/2]

- orbit around body x (dito) [1/2]

- landings with probes [2]

- returning x men who have landed the first time on y (with x incrementing after each succesfull last completion for any (y) different place) [body specific - mun 3, duna... 5]

Numbers for rough outline of Rep each should give. And they should give nothing else and no where else should rep come from, except ´strategies´ (maybe better call them ´policies´). And contract should give funds and nothing but funds. And science should come from ´the field´, period. Keep it clean and simple. Milestones -> Rep, Contracts -> funds, experiments -> science. If a contract offers to pay you for a trop where you can still do some science and achieve a milestone (by landing more kerbals there than ever before - and returning them savely to kerbin, maybe) all the better.

Edited March 25, 2015 by Mr. Scruffy

[Tex]

Okay, the way this sounds is you basically want to add another type of achievement-like contract called a Milestone?

I can see how this would play out, but I think that the current contracts system is pretty decent even at having its own milestone-esque contracts, such as the altitude record contracts and things like "Achieve Orbit" and "Explore _____" contracts. I think that these are pretty good milestone-ish things that players automatically strive to do and adding another feature to support it seems a tad redundant. While redundancy is good for construction, not so for achievements.

[Mr. Scruffy]

Well, it would clean things up. The milestones, you´d not have to select, you can just do them whenever. They are on a permanent list - some milestones might be hidden from it, maybe. One thing they´d all have in common: They´d all only give REP.

As contracts should only give funds. As science should come from experiments only. It keeps things clean and simple. Need funds? Do a contract. Need REP? Check the milestone sheet or just try to do something you havent done before into the blue. Need science? Do new experiments.

What i find redundant, is having to select these milestones from a list of contracts. Plus, if you do some of these contracts in the game right now, without having selected them before, (say altitude records) you simply miss out on any rewards for them. If you land on the mun, without anybody having told you to, you dont get any REP for it.

EDIT: Another idea: Maybe contracts should not come with these star-classifications and not at a fixed price. Instead, they´d tell you what they want you to do and you tell them, how much you want/need (advance and on completion, with advance weighed more heavily of course) for that, trading REP for higher rewards. The ´strategy´ transfering REP to funds could then be based on time (x REP to y funds each z number of days - not x REP for y funds earned), emulating public funding (by gov or donations). With that, if you keep up a decent pace with it (and are effecient about it), you could live off of milestones mostly for quite a while, maybe, only having to do so many contracts, as to them not becoming repetetive and a chore.

There would be basically two strategies. One more resembling a private company, and another more resembling an agency, with a continuum between the two. The first is to do some milestones (and possibly when they co-incite with lucrative contracts) and use the earned REP to earn more on contracts. This gives you income-peaks whenever you finish such a contract. The other way is to focus on the milestones, mostly ignore contracts, and use the earned REP to create a constant ´trickle´ (or stream, depending on you success and effort) of income via the ´strategy´ (=policy). Funding bigger projects, like the final building upgrades may still make you do a contract or two...

Definitely final EDIT to this post: I can also imagine, that this makes the game easier to balance for the devs. For example, right now, there is an infinite amount of science (not too far) out there. As proposed, there would be hardcaps on both REP (well, it gets really hard to earn more after you have sent 10 kerbals everywhere) and SCI to be dished out by the game in total. I´d guess that it´s easier to distribute a finite amount of something rather than an infinite amount. Or: How much SCI/REP/FUN should this contract give? Well, reducing it to just one number by principle makes this problem rather trivial: Harder contracts earn more money (and nothing else), period.

Edited March 27, 2015 by Mr. Scruffy

[Tex]

Okay, just a little final point:

It keeps things clean and simple.

Well... In my opinion, the contract system we have already is nice and simple. We have one list of contracts, and there are indeed permanent contracts to explore all of the planets and moons, I believe, which will stick around until you complete them. They have no deadline.

Plus, the contracts system is already quite simple when you accept them, it's all right in the contract's description: Do this objective, get this reward.

I just find you points a tad contradictory, because you want to keep it simple... by complicating it. Please don't take it as me trying to be negative about your ideas, because I find them quite interesting. It's just that I find it a little overcomplicated in the wide scope of things.

[Mr. Scruffy]

The premament contracts are indeed already a class of their own, sort of. But they are being shoehorned together with the profane. Which leads to things like the player going without reward if hasnt clicked on the contract before doing his first mun-landing (and then the contract disappears, too, iirc - or doesnt come up, if it´s something that it is supposed to be out of your league or something). They should at least be listed in another tab (next to avaiable and active...) as ´permanent´ and not count towards the mission limit.

The simple part is for the player knowing exactly where to look for what ressource by virtue of principle. You wont find science contracts - you have to do experiments for that. Only the permanent contracts give REP (but no funds). And so on... The fun part is to combine all three aspects in your next planed mission as you desire them.

The part with the negotiable rewards for the contracts is a tad more complicated than it is right now, sure. But REP, not being directly needed for anything, should have two ways of being used (not none) in order to create choices (and make it a real gameplay element). And it really doesnt have to be more complicated for the player - just present a price as is, and put a ´negotiate´ button next to it, that allows you to trade some of your REP for a higher reward/advance sum, which players not inclined to do so, can safely ignore.

[Tex]

I'm of the opinion that new players will fairly religiously follow the contracts already present as a means of progression. If they do decide to go for a Munar landing right off the bat, it would usually be in Sandbox mode, thus negating the contracts and all of career mode anyway.

I mean, the contracts even post an advance that assists the player in achieving the goal, by giving them a (frankly small) amount of funding. I think it's straightforward that players will usually follow the contracts to progress, if for no other reason than because you literally have to do contracts in order to advance in career mode, there is no alternative.

[tseitsei]

I agree that ALL those permanent contracts should be automatically active ALL the time without the need to wait for them to appear and then choose them seperately. Otherwise I think the contract system is quite ok.

[Tex]

It would certainly be an interesting take on things, but accepting them at the lowest tiers of space centres and the tech tree is next to pointless because the average new player (and a huuuuge majority of veterans, mind you!) would have an extremely difficult time doing anything without doing the first contracts first anyway. Might as well have them in a progression to keep things moving, making sure you have science and funds to fall back on in case of accidents, and progression also keeps the game interesting, in my opinion.

[Specialist290]

Moving this over to Suggesstions and Development Discussion, as it sounds like it's proposing a change or addition to the game. Carry on

[nholzric]

I agree that there should be a way to avoid missing "milestone" contracts by doing them too soon. On the other hand, by accepting them intentionally you can control when to use the advance funds.

I disagree with making milestones rep only and contracts funds only. I think it's lots of fun to sometimes choose contracts for funds (launch satellites), sometimes for science (test parts), sometimes because you're about to do it anyway (launch a station in Kerbal orbit), and sometimes because you want to explore.

Even though this decreases the importance of "field science" the completionist side of me still sends science parts on missions, never mind any survey contacts I accept along the way. This variety in contracts is a lot of fun, I'd be disappointed if the process was streamlined like you suggested even if you're suggestion is more realistic in some ways.