Is hiring new kerbals too expensive?

[falloutaddict]

I don't see how they are expensive, money is by no means difficult to come by in career even on some of the harder settings, you already start off with 4 free kerbals, and you can rescue kerbals for the cost of a rocket ship if you are for some reason too poor to hire the one you want.

It's a problem with Squad's aversion to time-based mechanics. A yearly budget would be much better than artificially boosting the cost of each successive Kerbal.

Yes, it's too expensive.

Better for who? Maybe your playstyle, but not everyones. I've never even needed to hire more than a couple Kerbals and when I did it was just a drop in the hat of my budget.

[Lord Aurelius]

Is there a mod for this? If not, this is a good opportunity for one.

I believe that CustomBarnKit has some settings to tweak the Kerbal hiring costs (among other things).

And in response to the topic of the thread, yes the Kerbal hiring costs are too high relative to the cost of the rockets (especially with the silly exponentially increasing cost). At least we have rescue contracts to get free Kerbals.

Edited July 7, 2015 by Lord Aurelius

[GoSlash27]

I think to many people are giving silly hiring costs a pass because rescue missions exist.

Pretty solid reason for giving it a pass IMO. If you play the game right you never need to hire kerbals. If you never hire them, then it doesn't matter how much they cost.

Best,

-Slashy

[Geschosskopf]

"No one gets left behind", folks - that's the name of the game now. Which pleases me greatly

Pretty solid reason for giving it a pass IMO. If you play the game right you never need to hire kerbals. If you never hire them, then it doesn't matter how much they cost.

Nobody left behind? Play the game right?

C'mon, guys. Wouldn't you agree that establishing permanent, large-scale, self-sufficient colonies is "playing the game right"? And that whole part about permanence means you HAVE to leave the colonists there. In large numbers. Otherwise it's not a colony, it's just a vacation resort (if you bring everybody home) or (if you move only a few Kerbals there) not big enough to be a viable colony.

So yeah, if all you do in the game is flags and footprints, and don't have too many disasters along the way, then you'll never run short of Kerbals. But if you're serious about establishing real, significant colonies worthy of the name, then you need hundreds of Kerbals. This is way more than you can get via rescues and also prohibitively expensive if you have to buy them.

Seriously, if you want to go all Xactar on your Kerbals, you do that in sandbox. Anybody playing career tries to take care of them. And taking career to its logical conclusion runs into a wall when it comes to getting enough Kerbals.

[klgraham1013]

Oh noes, one actually has to take care of his green rocket jockeys now, because *gasp* they are EXPENSIVE! Same goes for stranding Kerbals on Eve, Tylo or solar orbit - either you get your experienced kerbonauts back, or you have to fork cold cash for brand new roookies that can't even operate SAS

"No one gets left behind", folks - that's the name of the game now. Which pleases me greatly

The point is that they are exorbitantly more expensive later in the game for no discernible reason. It has nothing to do with the challenge (or lack there of) of keeping your Kerbals alive.

[falloutaddict]

I think to many people are giving silly hiring costs a pass because rescue missions exist.

It's not a pass, you have an option. Spend money and get a kerbal now at cost or spend money and time and get a kerbal when you rescue him/her at a possible profit. If you don't like how the game plays then change it/mod it/make your own game and stop trying to make everyone play the game you want to play.

[klgraham1013]

Better for who? Maybe your playstyle, but not everyones. I've never even needed to hire more than a couple Kerbals and when I did it was just a drop in the hat of my budget.

Better for everyone. Creating an artificial money hole is bad design, whether you have rescue missions or not. No Kerbal should ever cost as much as a rocket and I'd love for someone to explain to me why it makes sense. Again, "there's free Kerbal rescue missions" does not excuse this design choice.

Seriously, there's a lot of people who are fine with the increasing hiring cost per Kerbal. I'd love a reasoned response besides, "that's just the way you play" or "you never need to use this mechanic Squad implemented if you use this other mechanic Squad implemented."

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It's not a pass, you have an option. Spend money and get a kerbal now at cost or spend money and time and get a kerbal when you rescue him/her at a possible profit. If you don't like how the game plays then change it/mod it/make your own game and stop trying to make everyone play the game you want to play.

It's not about forcing a play style. I'm trying to understand why you all think this is good game design.

Edited July 7, 2015 by klgraham1013

[falloutaddict]

Better for everyone. Creating an artificial money hole is bad design, whether you have rescue missions or not. No Kerbal should ever cost as much as a rocket and I'd love for someone to explain to me why it makes sense. Again, "there's free Kerbal rescue missions" does not excuse this design choice.

Seriously, there's a lot of people who are fine with the increasing hiring cost per Kerbal. I'd love a reasoned response besides, "that's just the way you play" or "you never need to use this mechanic Squad implemented if you use this other mechanic Squad implemented."

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It's not about forcing a play style. I'm trying to understand why you all think this is good game design.

Because your idea isn't any better. Create an arbitrary budget that is going to drain money year by year as I have kerbals sitting inactive in the Astro complex? How is that not forcing a certain style play? There's nothing wrong with it as a game design because:

A) Expensive is a relative term, just because someone is managing their money poorly or killing off their kerbals and can't afford to hire new recruits doesn't mean they are expensive.

The money you get from contracts scales with the progression of the game. By the time you are finishing off the techtree there's no way you should be short on cash, the game practically throws money at you.

C) If you don't want to hire kerbals you have other options (rescue missions) just because you don't want to accept it as a rebuttal doesn't mean its not a valid one. For example - there is a boss in Dark Souls 1 (ceaseless discharge) who can be beaten in two ways, one involves fighting him (the hard way) the other involves knocking him off a cliff (the easy way). Both are completely legitimate strategies for progressing through the game, but you seem to be hung up on the fact that even though there is an easy way to get around the boss you still think the hard way is too hard and should be changed. There is one game mechanic that works one way and another that works another. Both help you achieve the same goal. And IMO they both work fine. People who think it is too hard have plenty of options available to them.

I'm trying to understand why you seem to think your ideas are better for everyone.

[Violent Jeb]

I'll put my hat in the "too expensive" camp. Kerbals shouldn't cost more than the rockets.

I do think that the cost of having more Kerbals employed at ksc should increase, but it should do so more linearly. Maybe each kerbal should cost 5k funds more than the last one, based on the number of total kerbals you have.

I shouldn't have to choose between extreme costs or to rescue kerbals from unrealistic locations. Unless I purpose build a rescue craft (which can usually do 4 orbital rescues with 5 landing "pods"), it is not realistic to otherwise hire extra employees in the early/mid game because of how tight all the upgrade margins are for the first tier of upgrades. AFAIK, NASA had a replacement astronaut available for each member of a given mission, so the first two concurrent launches should allow me to have 4 pilots employed without an unreasonable cost.

All told, i'm much more in favour of a recurring annual cost for all employed kerbals. In this way the career mode will encourage remote crafts where possible, and create (small) recurring costs for which the science module will offset nicely.

Choosing a "salaried" system also means that the cost of having multiple employees would scale appropriately - having 10 employees will add up after the first year, fortunately that time will allow a budding space center to cover some of this overhead in a more organic way. You could even have a "salary rate" slider at career start, to satisfy a person level of difficulty.

In addition to this, a salaried approach will also flesh out more options for manipulating the KR (that's kerbin resources) dept of KSC. For example, Higher level astronauts will logically have a higher annual cost, which means that your costs will grow more realistically, vs having the 10th kerbal cost several million funds or whatever.

Regardless of how it is handled, kerbalnaut cost is Definitely not balanced as of yet.

Edited July 7, 2015 by Violent Jeb
grammar

[Starslinger999]

I think like 10k for your first verbal is really just too much and when u hire like 5 you get to 100k and thats WAY to much (insert name of kerbal money here). narwals!

[Geschosskopf]

I do think that the cost of having more Kerbals employed at ksc should increase, but it should do so more linearly. Maybe each kerbal should cost 5k funds more than the last one, based on the number of total kerbals you have.

Given that once the tech tree is over, you only need Kerbals for menial labor (fixing flats, pumping gas), I see no reason to pay them wages. In exchange for doing these tasks, they get air and food. Plus usually a company car, a posh apartment, and lordship over an entire planet. OK, a small, barren moon, but still, they're the boss there. Seems like a fair trade to me. Because they don't need any formal education and that few Kerbals willingly volunteer to pump gas on Vall, Ike, or Gilly forever, I have to resort to pressgangs. Drag a derelict out of the gutter or just take some from the local jail. On the way out to Jool, they can watch enough training videos to know what to do. Thus, I see no reason for expensive hiring of KSC employees, nor having to pay them beyond what I already invest in their ships and life support supplies.

Colonies, OTOH, are full of civilians/tourists. But no tourists without contracts and they all want to return home, so they're out. This leaves hiring at KSC. Which is silly because they should be paying me to take them to their new home.

[Sawyer7as]

I didn't see it mentioned, but once the kerbals you rescue board your craft you can go to the kerbalnaut complex and go to the active list. You should be able to see their class and specs there

[annallia]

I find them ridiculously expensive for two reasons.

#1 The price goes up with every kerbal, even the ones you rescue instead of hiring. You quickly end up spending hundreds of thousands to hire the kerbal(s) to man the station that you are only being paid (after expenses) a few thousand for.. Essentially it eventually becomes pointless to directly hire them resulting in you relying entirely on rescues which just takes a ton of time running boring missions or timewarping to get different contracts.

#2 No class selection. I would love for there to be say 12 kerbals in the complex waiting to be hired, 4 pilots, 4 engineers, 4 scientist, when you hire all your scientist it recruits more. Barring that mechanic how about a function to tell them to recruit a specific class? Because I play my own version of career scientist and pilots are not exactly needed as much as engineers are. I would love for the ability to tell my recruiters to recruit more engineers making it stack the complex with more engineers than other classes. Also need a way to dismiss unwanted kerbals from the complex without hiring them (essentially refreshing the list) so that way I am not sitting there with 34 kerbals off planet in a dozen vessels each with 2 pilots in them and still have 15 pilots sitting at home.

[Aragosnat]

I didn't see it mentioned, but once the kerbals you rescue board your craft you can go to the kerbalnaut complex and go to the active list. You should be able to see their class and specs there

Actually. Once you accept the contract you see what they are. Just what they are stuck in is unknown most of the time. Good thing about rescue X kerbal and bring home his craft. They are almost telling you what it is. Since the empty craft only have one craft that weights the same as it.

By the time my "Flying Bus" reaches Duna with its 32 passangers. I should have enough to send to them again. Yes. It maybe a vacation home. Well. I might have to let some tourists live there. I'll just take a rep hit if they can stay there.

But, yes. I do think it is problematic that they increase in kost with evey Kerbal you have. Certaily does not make sense for rookies to cost so much.

One way is a yearly salary. Not a bad thing. But, a problem if you have a lot sitting at the Kerbalnuat complex. Way to solve that would be to have the salary based on assigned not available or dead.

Another way would be to have them cost x at launch with the cost being higher for higher starts and no stars could be free. With the costs on normal being simalar to what probes that have similar pilot skills. 1 stars cost as much as the OKTO, 2 sars as much as OCTO2 and so on.

[tranenturm]

I always find the "this is too much grind. Oh, I play on hard" comments odd when all the difficulty settings really do is increase grind. I play on normal and therefor never have to grind.

As for costs, the best I could see for real numbers was 1.7 billion for the space shuttle, and 50 million for astronaut training(though that was someone's guesstimate, not an official number). So sure Kerbals cost a bit too much. No big deal though until you start getting crazy with them and at that point, you're a bit beyond the expected normal gameplay of KSP and probably should consider a mod.

I don't find it to be a problem (but I'm also not trying to collect dozens of them). Get a mod if you want that many.

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Here's an attempt to justify the cost. The us space shuttle program over all years was estimated to cost 200 billion. If each shuttle cost 1.7 billion, most of the cost of the program was in non vehicular areas. So for KSP, the cost of hiring a Kerbal includes the cost of a portion of your ground staff. The more Kerbals you have, the larger your overall program.

But really, the question is moot as we have all sorts of other costs not present and the real answer is, it's a game and we set the cost here.

[Merinsan]

Better for everyone. Creating an artificial money hole is bad design, whether you have rescue missions or not. No Kerbal should ever cost as much as a rocket and I'd love for someone to explain to me why it makes sense. Again, "there's free Kerbal rescue missions" does not excuse this design choice.

Seriously, there's a lot of people who are fine with the increasing hiring cost per Kerbal. I'd love a reasoned response besides, "that's just the way you play" or "you never need to use this mechanic Squad implemented if you use this other mechanic Squad implemented."

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It's not about forcing a play style. I'm trying to understand why you all think this is good game design.

Having a yearly budget would mean people would never get to Eeloo or Jool, because you're going to have to continually run missions for income while that ship is transferring to Jool. This will be very annoying for a lot of players - me included. While I frequently run multiple missions at a time, I don't want to be forced to run years of missions while waiting for the Jool transfer.

The reason the mechanic is the way it is, is as you pointed out, Squads aversion to time based mechanics. I think the approach they used is a good compromise. The cost increases as an approximation to the increase of salary costs. Having said that, I think the actual implementation is unbalanced - it becomes too expensive too fast.

One thing I think is missing from the game is a "colonist" crew member. When I build a base/station/whatever, I want to populate it. Making Kerbals so expensive makes this impossible (even with rescue missions it's a very long grind). I think there is room for squad to introduce a new type of crew for this purpose.

[Streetwind]

That moment when you come back the next day to a thread you tried to post something helpful in, looking to see if it helped anyone...

Oh KSP forum, you never cease to amaze me

On topic: Yearly budgets can be made to work if they're mission specific. Think of it a bit like NASA's budget. They get a ton of money, but they also cannot use it at will - they have to declare what they want to use it for, and then use it as declared. (And it would be a good system if non-scientists wouldn't meddle in it, but let's leave that particular discussion for another thread.)

Imagine that you couldn't accept contracts at any time, but rather only once per ingame period X. A year might not be very playable, so let's say per month. At the start of each month (and only then), you get presented a large list of contracts. You then pick as many as you like (perhaps with some restrictions from your mission control building), and declare that those are your goals for the following month(s). If you accept a contract to land a Kerbal on the Mun, then you better do that before the end of the decade month, because the contract won't give you a 10 year allowance like it does now. It wants that Kerbal to have its flag planted by the due date, or you fail the contract and get penalized.

More advanced missions could be multi-month missions. For example, a mission to Jool might stipulate several intermediate goals as well as ongoing funding. Example:

- Each month, receive X funds (could be variable to start out with a lot but decrease over time)

- By the end of the first month, conduct at least one launch that you attach to this contract (would obviously require that capability)

- By the end of the second month, have a vessel on a Jool intercept trajectory

- By the end of the third month, have a manned vessel on a Jool intercept trajectory (can be the same as #2, but also gives the option of sending an unmanned probe that arrives ahead of the main mission vehicle to practice insertion burns and aerobraking if you've never been to Jool before or set up a commsat relay for RemoteTech etc.)

- By the end of the fourth month, still have a manned vessel on a Jool intercept trajectory (so if you play with life support and forget to bring any and your Kerbals die two weeks into the mission, the contract fails at the next checkpoint)

- By the end of the X'th month, have a vessel in Jool's SoI

- And so on

Each intermediate goal would make the whole contract fail if not achieved on its due date.

Not sure if such a system would actually be good for KSP, but it's a possible implementation for time-based budgets.

Edited July 8, 2015 by Streetwind

[Caelib]

Why hire Kerbals when you can get them for free via "Rescue" missions?

[r4pt0r]

Why hire Kerbals when you can get them for free via "Rescue" missions?

It is kind of a drag not knowing what they will be before you rescue them. My program demands pilots dangit!

[nekogod]

Even worse is 2 of the classes are essentially useless from the end of the early game into the early mid game. Pilots are completely redundant once you have decent probe cores and scientists are completely redundant once you max out the tech tree, which you can do without leaving kerbins sphere of influence and without scientists!

[GoSlash27]

One thing I think is missing from the game is a "colonist" crew member. When I build a base/station/whatever, I want to populate it. Making Kerbals so expensive makes this impossible (even with rescue missions it's a very long grind). I think there is room for squad to introduce a new type of crew for this purpose.

I bet that could be done with a simple contract tweak. A tourist is basically the same thing as a colonist. You should run it up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes it. I think it's an awesome idea.

Best,

-Slashy

[ArmchairGravy]

Yes. Rescue missions don't necessarily give you the crew you need. For instance I've now rescued five pilots, but just had to spend 100k so I can have a functioning science lab. Since I like to keep at least two labs, I will be spending over 300k on personnel. Half that price I would consider fair.

[Yemo]

Imho kerbal costs is now one of those "fake-progression for its own sake" things.

I set hiring costs to 40k flat for SETIctt. Cosmonauts are not cheap, but they do not become more expensive the more you hire...

[JDCollie]

I don't feel that they're too expensive so much as they are too expensive for how unskilled they are, and how little control we have over role availability. Also, the per-hiring cost increase make no sense to me whatsoever.

[StrandedonEarth]

Also, the per-hiring cost increase make no sense to me whatsoever.

It's one way of keeping the Kerbal population down (Have your Kerbals spayed or neutered, or send them on a ballistic re-entry!). It also encourages rescuing those poor clods stuck in space, although that would go counter to both Darwin and Bob Barker