Pre-Career Company selection/career presets

[ackley14]

Not sure if this idea has been thrown arround before but either way, here goes:

Basically when starting a new career mode, you can pick a starting sponsor from all currently available (stock and mod based) agencies. (you can opt out completely and choose "indy" instead for the default career mode). you can also still pick whatever mission flag you want however based on your sponsor choice, the default mission flag is set to that companies logo.

So what would selecting a sponsor/benefactor do for you? well for starters, it would change how career mode progresses. For example, picking a more greedy company (interested in profits over exploration) would give you less starting money (but more starting science since they're a large well formed company) and various contracts would give overall less or more payout (noticeably but not so much as to make things impossible : i.e. 5% less/more or something to that effect) . On top of that the company you pick would also dictate your tech tree to some extent, where the more greedy company will charge more for unlocking of parts (but less for actually using them due to production connections) and you'll start off with more nodes unlocked than just the first few. also there would be an option for a custom company (where you could make your own sponsor which would be like the way things are now when you set up career mode (all those settings) but its saved as a future preset and you can set your default flag, and business practices ect ect.

companies can even have 'traits' which give them/you special effects durring game play. for example, this greedy company could have the (aforementioned) connections trait thus reducing all build costs by, say 15%. things like that i think would be super cool. and you could catagorize each of the companies, so like, easy/medium/hard ect.

quite a few other factors can be modified with this idea but that's basically it.

just a thought i had. what do you all think?

Edited May 5, 2015 by ackley14

[thereaverofdarkness]

If I choose O.M.B., do I get more ejection force with a chance of exploding my crafts?

[ackley14]

If I choose O.M.B., do I get more ejection force with a chance of exploding my crafts?

hahaha the "explosive" trait X3

[nholzric]

Interesting idea. Would companies be based solely on their level of greed?

I think this idea would be more interesting if sponsor companies were differentiated by areas of expertise rather than their level of greed. There might be some in-game effects like a mining company might boost a drills output or make parts handle heat better or something. But the biggest difference companies would have would be the organization of the tech tree (great idea by you!) and the type/availability of contracts. Maybe one company would rearrange the tech tree to start you off with probes (a frequently requested feature). Maybe one company would make aircraft parts easier to research. One company might be the BIG ROCKET company - in contrast to the probe company I guess. The tech tree would have a huge effect on the beginning of the game but diminishes as all the parts are unlocked.

The types or availability of different types of contracts would persist for the entire game - at least until the point where career morphs into something closer to sandbox. So if you want to do tons of flying contracts, go with the aircraft guys - get planes sooner and have flying contracts more available. If launching satellites or sending probes is your thing go with the probe guys.

I just thought of three types - probes, aircraft, big rockets; I'm sure people can think of more.

This doesn't seem like a likely addition to stock, but I know you could mod it in. Maybe not with an opening selection GUI when you start a new game, but you can tailor the tech tree, contracts, and parts to do all this stuff before launching a new game.

[ackley14]

Interesting idea. Would companies be based solely on their level of greed?

I think this idea would be more interesting if sponsor companies were differentiated by areas of expertise rather than their level of greed. There might be some in-game effects like a mining company might boost a drills output or make parts handle heat better or something. But the biggest difference companies would have would be the organization of the tech tree (great idea by you!) and the type/availability of contracts. Maybe one company would rearrange the tech tree to start you off with probes (a frequently requested feature). Maybe one company would make aircraft parts easier to research. One company might be the BIG ROCKET company - in contrast to the probe company I guess. The tech tree would have a huge effect on the beginning of the game but diminishes as all the parts are unlocked.

The types or availability of different types of contracts would persist for the entire game - at least until the point where career morphs into something closer to sandbox. So if you want to do tons of flying contracts, go with the aircraft guys - get planes sooner and have flying contracts more available. If launching satellites or sending probes is your thing go with the probe guys.

I just thought of three types - probes, aircraft, big rockets; I'm sure people can think of more.

This doesn't seem like a likely addition to stock, but I know you could mod it in. Maybe not with an opening selection GUI when you start a new game, but you can tailor the tech tree, contracts, and parts to do all this stuff before launching a new game.

well i mostly used greed as an example cause it was the only company 'type' i could think of when writing this lol. but yeah what you're saying goes very in line with the idea, basically there'd be traits, so in your example, the mining company could have the "resourceful" trait wich boosts the resource gathering rate of any and all resource harvesters (mods included). or the "cool" trait lol.

this could totaly be a mod. If i took the time to learn i bet i could get something put togeather. maybe using the community tech tree mod as a base or something like that lol. didn't think of that!