[Released] Strategia

[severedsolo]

I presume that we contract pack authors can enable strategia support if we want? (just like you have with KSS?) - it's not something you have to hard code?

[nightingale]

44 minutes ago, severedsolo said:

I presume that we contract pack authors can enable strategia support if we want? (just like you have with KSS?) - it's not something you have to hard code?

Yup - I assume this is for the Bases stuff you're doing?

[Svm420]

Really like the idea of the mod, but I am unsure about part boni. How will that work with say Realchutes, RWsaturatable reaction wheels, realfuels? If compatibility can be had that's great, but would be disappointing if the a core bonus is tied to only playing stock. 2c from  a heavy mod user who loves what you done for contracts.

[severedsolo]

2 minutes ago, nightingale said:

Yup - I assume this is for the Bases stuff you're doing?

Eventually yes. I may roll the whole pack under one contract group once I get it sorted out, so the patch you made will work for everything.

[nightingale]

4 minutes ago, Svm420 said:

Really like the idea of the mod, but I am unsure about part boni. How will that work with say Realchutes, RWsaturatable reaction wheels, realfuels? If compatibility can be had that's great, but would be disappointing if the a core bonus is tied to only playing stock. 2c from  a heavy mod user who loves what you done for contracts.

I'd have to handle on a case by case basis.  Mods that extend the stock modules will usually work without me doing anything (RWsaturatable falls into this category), but ones that implement their own thing would need specific support (RealChutes, RealFuels).  I'll track these in [#5] with the intention of having those working at release (though probably not at beta).

[Reiver]

I like every bit but the Tier 3 stuff; especially the Pilot and Engineer parts.

I mean, I get the idea, but messing with ISP and strut strength just seems... off. (If struts aren't strong enough, maybe they should just be stronger, y'know what I'm sayin'?)

Engineers could, I suppose, get a refinery bonus; it's their primary use in the later game.

Pilots... well, they obsolete all too easily as-is. But perhaps something to do with the remote control rules coming soon?

[nightingale]

5 hours ago, Reiver said:

I like every bit but the Tier 3 stuff; especially the Pilot and Engineer parts.

I mean, I get the idea, but messing with ISP and strut strength just seems... off. (If struts aren't strong enough, maybe they should just be stronger, y'know what I'm sayin'?)

Engineers could, I suppose, get a refinery bonus; it's their primary use in the later game.

Pilots... well, they obsolete all too easily as-is. But perhaps something to do with the remote control rules coming soon?

The idea is to give a reason to have that role on your vessel all the time.  We'll see what the remote control stuff looks like when it comes - I don't want to plan around a feature that doesn't exist yet.

[riocrokite]

I really like the idea Nightingale

A quick brain dump below; maybe some ideas might be useful for development:

- introducing 2nd deadline that would be unmovable and would provide some kind of a space-race factor. For example a player unlocks the first contract to go to Duna (fly-by). At the same time the Duna strategy would become available. This strategy would have 2 types of deadlines: 1st standard deadline (i.e. 2 years from the moment you activate it) and 2nd deadline (i.e. 4 years from when this strategy option became available). So if for 4 years you would have focused on other planets or other strategies this strategy would become unavailable to you (other country/organisation has achieved this goal so there's no bonus for it).

- continuing above idea, why not increasing the end grand prize however with more challenges to complete it (for example land and return kerbal from planet, have a spacestation on an orbit of that planet, land n number of kerbals on the planet and then fly them to the spacestation that is on a planet's orbit (need to spend some time in orbit in artificial-G to account for boneloss encountered during a stay on a body), supply x number of fuel / other resources from that planet to the spacestation in orbit, do specific research on all planet's biomes, investigate n number of planet's anomalies etc)

- another idea for a grand prize except funds would be to decrease production time of certain stuff in KCT (mun - engines, minimus - crew cabins, duna ike - fuel tanks etc),

- the extreme version of above idea would be to unlock certain technologies that would be available only by completing the strategy (i.e. highly efficient atmospheric ISRU's after completing core duna strategy), I guess this might be quite hard to implement

- speaking of core strategies, maybe there could be some differentiation: core strategy - > medium end prize, however much easier to achieve (land 1 kerbal on a planet) thus a player could finish this strategy faster and move on to other strategies before their 2nd deadline expires. And then 2nd strategy (enhanced) - biggest end prize however many more things to do hence more time needed to do it all.

 

[nightingale]

8 minutes ago, riocrokite said:

I really like the idea Nightingale

A quick brain dump below; maybe some ideas might be useful for development:

- introducing 2nd deadline that would be unmovable and would provide some kind of a space-race factor. For example a player unlocks the first contract to go to Duna (fly-by). At the same time the Duna strategy would become available. This strategy would have 2 types of deadlines: 1st standard deadline (i.e. 2 years from the moment you activate it) and 2nd deadline (i.e. 4 years from when this strategy option became available). So if for 4 years you would have focused on other planets or other strategies this strategy would become unavailable to you (other country/organisation has achieved this goal so there's no bonus for it).

- continuing above idea, why not increasing the end grand prize however with more challenges to complete it (for example land and return kerbal from planet, have a spacestation on an orbit of that planet, land n number of kerbals on the planet and then fly them to the spacestation that is on a planet's orbit (need to spend some time in orbit in artificial-G to account for boneloss encountered during a stay on a body), supply x number of fuel / other resources from that planet to the spacestation in orbit, do specific research on all planet's biomes, investigate n number of planet's anomalies etc)

- another idea for a grand prize except funds would be to decrease production time of certain stuff in KCT (mun - engines, minimus - crew cabins, duna ike - fuel tanks etc),

- the extreme version of above idea would be to unlock certain technologies that would be available only by completing the strategy (i.e. highly efficient atmospheric ISRU's after completing core duna strategy), I guess this might be quite hard to implement

- speaking of core strategies, maybe there could be some differentiation: core strategy - > medium end prize, however much easier to achieve (land 1 kerbal on a planet) thus a player could finish this strategy faster and move on to other strategies before their 2nd deadline expires. And then 2nd strategy (enhanced) - biggest end prize however many more things to do hence more time needed to do it all.

 

There's some good ideas here!  I'm trying to stay away from getting into too many detailed missions, because then it would be building something that is better done through a contract pack, but via strategies (although read on for the dev diary post that I'm going to put up right after this one...).  The problem with the multiple deadlines is that I make all the planetary missions available at once to give the player choice - if they want to do the Moho one first, they can.  They can also do multiples (just not at the same time).  So the secondary deadline would mess witht that vision a bit.

Unlocking tech for completing goals is a really cool idea, but probably needs more infrastructure (ie. parts) than I can put into this mod.  There's been a couple contract packs that have played around with that idea though (Mission Based R&D was one of the main ones, if I recall).

[nightingale]

Strategia Development Diary #4 - The Contract Configurator

This is going to be a bit of a shorter diary, because I spent the bulk of last week working on the fairly massive Contract Configurator 1.9.0 release (I need to start ignoring some of the enhancement requests I'm being hit with so I can progress Strategia).  What I had been hoping to show off was the uncrewed series of mission strategies (which will get pushed to next week).  Rather than having exact mirrors of the crewed strategies, I'm planning on making the uncrewed ones a little bit different.  They'll focus on different types of uncrewed vessels, so there might be one with a goal of doing a fly-by of two or three bodies (of the player's choice), or landing probes/rovers on three different biomes on Duna.

All those goals are extremely easy to do in Contract Configurator, and I quickly found that I was redoing a lot of work that I've done before (and doing it far more poorly, because it's difficult to show the goal progression to the player in a strategy).  So I made a decision - Strategia will have Contract Configurator as a required mod, and will provide those goals via a contract that is auto-accepted when the strategy is accepted.  This has the effect of opening up a ton of options at a very low development cost.

So as we see below, the strategy gives us a contract, which sits in our contract list as a reminder of our commitments.

[nightingale]

Strategia Development Diary #5 - Uncrewed Missions

It's been another busy week with Contract Configurator bugs/enhancements, and Strategia suffered again.  Fortunately, I was able to finish off the work that I'd planned to show off in this week's development diary.  Wernher von Kerman is proud to present his series of uncrewed missions.

What you'll immediately notice from the image on the right are the similarities with the crewed missions that I showed off a few weeks back.  Although similar, I'm planning on giving them slightly different rewards that are a little bit more science based, as well as changing the top-tier missions completely.  Note that I still need to fix up the rewards - the numbers are just place-holders copied from the crewed missions.

Generic Probe Missions

First up are the generic probe missions that get offered for each celestial body.  Unlike the crewed missions that just require a landing, these will require a landing in multiple biomes.  Although it doesn't explicitly state it as a requirement, this encourages science gathering and "biome hopping".  Of course, some planets may require more than one lander to visit multiple biomes, like Eve here.

This is powered by a new feature in Contract Configurator that allows a contract author to easily copy parameters for every item in a list (like I've done with the biomes).  It used to be these types of contracts were among the most complex - now they are ridiculously simple.

Impactor Probe Missions

Next up are the impactor probes.  Now instead of having  a specific body for a goal, these will ask you to send probes to multiple different bodies.  These can't all be the same probe (for somewhat obvious reasons), but it's definitely possible to make one big probe that splits off smaller impactors.

Planetary Flyby Probe Missions

Finally, the planetary flybys encourage a player to send out a probe to multiple bodies while performing flybys.  Ideally this will encourage using gravity assists to get to the different bodies (the flavour text of the strategy encourages this).  Of course, if a player chooses to do this with multiple probes, that's their choice.  It'll also give a nice chunk of bonus science for adjusting course to do flybys of the moons of planets the player chooses to visit.

That's it for this week, hopefully only a few more weeks for me to get the rest of the strategies knocked out.  I'm also quite happy that managed to figure out how to get the layouts for these dev notes the way that I want them in IPS - far better than what could be done back in vBulletin (although it requires some HTML hackery).

Edited December 15, 2015 by nightingale

[nightingale]

Crowd-sourcing time!

One of the balance items I'm going to have to do is look at the reputation requirements for strategies.  However, I need to baseline that based on how much reputation a player is typically expected to have at different points in their career progression.  There are a lot of factors that can change this, but I'd like to get a stock-ish estimate of what the progression looks like.

Here's where you come in.  For your career games, I'd like the following information:

1. Where you are in the career progression
2. Where you are in the tech tree
3. What your reputation is

To make it easy to collect this information, I've created a google spreadsheet here.  If anyone has multiple saves at different points and can provide multiple data points from a single career that would be awesome - but I'll settle for what I can get.

Please provide a comment on any mods you're using that might impact the results.  For example, there's lots of contract packs out there that have seriously unbalanced rewards.  So if you're taking contracts that give 100's of rep points, then your data may not be as valid as someone closer to stock.

Thanks to anyone who's able to contribute!

Edited December 18, 2015 by nightingale

[MrHappyFace]

Your spreadsheet appears to be in read only mode

[nightingale]

4 minutes ago, MrHappyFace said:

Your spreadsheet appears to be in read only mode

Whoops, thanks for that - should be fixed now.

[nightingale]

No dev diary post this week, the holiday season has got me super busy.

I will ask again for anyone who can to update the reputation spreadsheet for me - otherwise I'll have to spend a lot more time trying to balance those numbers and it'll delay the release of the beta.

[smjjames]

I agree with the sentiment given in the OP in that theres only a few that seem to be in any way useful in general and there is little variety. I was trying to find mods which change the current strategies or add new ones and theres very few, none of them are in the scope or breadth of this one though.

Also, what is BROKE?

On 12/1/2015 at 10:06 AM, nightingale said:

Strategia Development Diary #3 - Professional Focus

-snippity snip-

The +50 strut strength seems kind of redundant since struts are already pretty strong and it actually is redundant if you're using KJR.

Also, an idea on the planetary strategies: Maybe you can take advantage of the progressive feature (and whatever new features come in 1.1) where it would chain missions/contracts to the final goal. Probably not for the Mun/Minmus, but for other planets, yeah. Basically something like a quest chain, just needs to be as open and freeform as possible.

I've entered my data for the reputation spreadsheet. Does your research tier thing account for usage of non-stock tech trees?

Edited December 25, 2015 by smjjames

[nightingale]

On 25/12/2015 at 9:18 PM, smjjames said:

I agree with the sentiment given in the OP in that theres only a few that seem to be in any way useful in general and there is little variety. I was trying to find mods which change the current strategies or add new ones and theres very few, none of them are in the scope or breadth of this one though.

Also, what is BROKE?

BROKE.

On 25/12/2015 at 9:18 PM, smjjames said:

The +50 strut strength seems kind of redundant since struts are already pretty strong and it actually is redundant if you're using KJR.

True, which is why it's in a big list of things.  May require balancing.

On 25/12/2015 at 9:18 PM, smjjames said:

Also, an idea on the planetary strategies: Maybe you can take advantage of the progressive feature (and whatever new features come in 1.1) where it would chain missions/contracts to the final goal. Probably not for the Mun/Minmus, but for other planets, yeah. Basically something like a quest chain, just needs to be as open and freeform as possible.

The feature isn't really something that's useful for Contract Configurator (or Strategia).  Anyway, the mission-based strategies are meant to set a rather broad goal, rather than having a chain of contracts/missions.

On 25/12/2015 at 9:18 PM, smjjames said:

I've entered my data for the reputation spreadsheet. Does your research tier thing account for usage of non-stock tech trees?

Not specifically, but if you put something in the comment it's still useful data for me.

[RaendyLeBeau]

awesome work !  what is the approximate release date ?

[nightingale]

42 minutes ago, RaendyLeBeau said:

awesome work !  what is the approximate release date ?

Was pretty busy during the Christmas break, and Contract Configurator issues piled up.  I've worked through the critical ones and I'm going to focus on getting a Strategia beta out soon.  Maybe even in the next week.

[RaendyLeBeau]

16 hours ago, nightingale said:

Was pretty busy during the Christmas break, and Contract Configurator issues piled up.  I've worked through the critical ones and I'm going to focus on getting a Strategia beta out soon.  Maybe even in the next week.

super looking forward to the release, this mod is an enrichment for the gamplay.

[smjjames]

@nightingale Just letting you know that I've updated my entry in the spreadsheet.

[nightingale]

Strategia Development Diary #6 - State of the Mod

Thanks everyone who's updated their reputation/progress info into my spreadsheet.  I still would like a lot more data, so anyone who hasn't put their info for their current saves in, I'd really appreciate it if you could do so.  The spreadsheet can be found here.

We're slowly inching our way towards a beta release.  Here's what the strategies look like at the moment:

And here's the list of major items to be done before I can release a beta:

• Add final strategies (one more set for Science, two more for Finances).
• Additional strategy tweaks/balancing
• Balance reputation & strategy costs

Hopefully if not too much gets in the way I should be able to get that done in the next week or two.  Of course, beta really will mean beta, there's still lots of work to be done, including:

• More quality of life improvements
• Art pass
• Implement player feedback
• Final balance pass

We'll see what the KSP 1.1 timeline - ideally I'd like to have the full Strategia release shortly before 1.1 comes out so that it's ready for anyone looking to start a new career save in 1.1.

[smjjames]

'Astronaut Training Program' doesn't really sound like something that would go under financial. Would be good to have other types of financial type strategies.

Also, with six strategy groupings, is it possible to increase the number of allowed strategies at any one time (dependent on admin building level)?

[nightingale]

29 minutes ago, smjjames said:

'Astronaut Training Program' doesn't really sound like something that would go under financial. Would be good to have other types of financial type strategies.

The groupings may still change before beta, but there will definitely be a big financial representation.

32 minutes ago, smjjames said:

Also, with six strategy groupings, is it possible to increase the number of allowed strategies at any one time (dependent on admin building level)?

Heh, I'm actually planning on reducing it from 1/3/5 to 1/2/3 so the decision on which strategies to take is more difficult.  But that's one of those things that can always change through play-testing.

[theonegalen]

With regard to the planetary programs, how complicated is it to write a new one having to do with Kopernicus-added planets? OPM, for example?

I also wonder how difficult it would be to create a Voyager type program, where the probe(s) are supposed to go to multiple planetary bodies?

Edited January 6, 2016 by theonegalen