All That Unused Science

[Joonatan1998]

I think some endgame use for science is needed.

Adjusting the science returns doesn't really help, if you put them low enough to not get flooded in science in endgame you get almost impossible start and mid-game.

[Xaver]

For me it works well with self editing the techtree. I simply create higher nodes with mods in it. KIS for 20000 science seems good.

[samstarman5]

Late in a game of Skyrim, when I have so much gold I can't figure out how to get rid of it, I still reflexively grab that daedric armor and try to figure out how to carry it to where I can cash it in. I can't stop myself from doing it, because that is the main reward mechanism of the game.

Science fills that same role for the career version of KSP. I have to send ships to places, because what else is there to do in KSP? And when I do send them there, if there is science to be grabbed I have to grab it. Because that's what you do. It just goes against every conditioned response to fly a ship to a new biome and then ignore the science I could grab from it. But like that meaningless Skyrim gold, why am I really doing this?

Career mode does let you turn science into money, but it's not like I'm short of money, either. My bank account is something like 23 million roots right now. And even though my late game ships may cost 2 million roots each, with contracts and science and reusing those expensive ships the bank account still grows.

The answer I often found in Skyrim was to start a new game, with a new character, and try to play it a different way. (All magic! All archery! No armor! Etc.) With KSP my answer is usually to start over but with different mods.

The nice thing about Skyrim that you can do that you can't with KSP is 'accidentally' lose all that gold and loot down some chasm or some chest that you may never find again. I've actually done that often with my toons, where they end up just losing it all and have to scavenge the wilderness for a time. A high lockpicking and pickpocketing skill helps me avoid taking on armed bandits with my fists, to be sure.

As for spending all those funds, I have come up with a little challenge to that effect:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/132447-Jebediah-s-Millions-%28A-play-on-the-challenge-given-in-the-movie-Brewster-s-Millions%29

[mikegarrison]

The nice thing about Skyrim that you can do that you can't with KSP is 'accidentally' lose all that gold and loot down some chasm or some chest that you may never find again. I've actually done that often with my toons, where they end up just losing it all and have to scavenge the wilderness for a time. A high lockpicking and pickpocketing skill helps me avoid taking on armed bandits with my fists, to be sure.

As for spending all those funds, I have come up with a little challenge to that effect:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/132447-Jebediah-s-Millions-%28A-play-on-the-challenge-given-in-the-movie-Brewster-s-Millions%29

Another thing they implemented in Skyrim (with the add-on content) is that once you max out a skill you can try to make it "legendary" by giving up all your experience in that skill and starting again. Hard to see how that could be done in KSP.

[Plume & Akakak]

Late in a game of Skyrim, when I have so much gold I can't figure out how to get rid of it, I still reflexively grab that daedric armor and try to figure out how to carry it to where I can cash it in. I can't stop myself from doing it, because that is the main reward mechanism of the game.

Science fills that same role for the career version of KSP. I have to send ships to places, because what else is there to do in KSP? And when I do send them there, if there is science to be grabbed I have to grab it. Because that's what you do. It just goes against every conditioned response to fly a ship to a new biome and then ignore the science I could grab from it. But like that meaningless Skyrim gold, why am I really doing this?

Career mode does let you turn science into money, but it's not like I'm short of money, either. My bank account is something like 23 million roots right now. And even though my late game ships may cost 2 million roots each, with contracts and science and reusing those expensive ships the bank account still grows.

The answer I often found in Skyrim was to start a new game, with a new character, and try to play it a different way. (All magic! All archery! No armor! Etc.) With KSP my answer is usually to start over but with different mods.

Yep, I had a Skyrim comparison in mind when I wrote my previous post.

Why we keep on running after experience points, gold, tech points or any other currency is simple, it's not even a question I ask myself. The sole purpose of accumulating any kind of resources or points in a video game is as valid as any other reason.

That's why I don't like reading that science points in KSP become "useless" once the tech tree has been completed.

For the chitchat, we -I played it with my wife- have never started a new game in Skyrim. A single storyline kept us occupied for long enough. We play slow. We left quests aside for weeks, spent hours hunting, blindly mixing alchemical ingredients, or just fooling around, like I've spent weeks in my KSP career mapping a ridiculous portion of Duna's surface, climbing up its tholi to plant flags.

And once we had "finished" Skyrim, we felt it was unnecessary to try it differently (joining the few guilds we hadn't joined or making different choices in the main campaign). We didn't need to exhaust the game, feeling this would kinda belittle the experience.

I'm always amazed when I read that some of you regularly start a new career in KSP, and do so much in a short time. I've started playing KSP a year ago, play it a lot, and haven't played any other "long-term" game since. I'm still on the same, single career game (that survived the 0.90 and 1.0 updates), and still have to visit half of the system's celestial bodies. Beside being unhurried/sluggish, it seems I'm doing in my career game what some of you do in a separate sandbox game. It can get costly, but I like it to be a one-piece, slow-paced experience. That's how I was playing Minecraft as well.

Edited August 25, 2015 by Plume & Akakak