Career mode : advance of a contract

[Kraken1950]

Hello,

Something is bugging me about contracts. Companies offer you an advance when you accept a contract. The amount, just like the completion, depends of the difficulty of the mission. How should this advance be considered ?

Is that a way for the game to tell you if a rocket design is acceptable ? For example, a contract gives me 100 000 credits as an advance. Should I consider my design as :

- Good : if total cost < advance

- Bad : if total cost > advance

- Or advance is not related, you might need to put more money on the table to achieve the objective ?

I have a mission which requires to bring a class C asteroid in Kerbin orbit and the advance is 163 000 credits, (+ 429k credits for completion) do you think it is enough ?

[Snark]

It's a non-issue.  You should think of the value of the contract in terms of total value, i.e. the advance plus the reward.  If there's a 100K advance and a 300K reward, then that's a 400K contract.  The fact that you happen to get some of that money before you complete it is a side issue.

Then on the other side of the ledger, is the total cost.  This equals the cost of the ship you need to build to do the mission, plus the intangible "cost" of your spending your personal time executing the contract.

So if you're deciding "should I take this contract or not", think of it this way:

• Add the advance plus reward for the contract.  This is the total value.
• Subtract the cost of the ship it'll take you to complete the contract.  Now you have the net cash profit.
• Then ask yourself:  Is this amount of net profit worth spending the amount of my time to do the contract?

(Note that all of the above is assuming that your only motivation in accepting the contract is to make money.  Some contracts are just fun to do, and your personal time is a benefit rather than a cost.) 

 

[ForScience6686]

The only time the advance really makes a difference is early career.  I expand mission control for more available contracts and use the advance for more building upgrades.  Early contracts are usually cheap to complete so I'm not too worried about using up the advance.

[Plusck]

There is a random element to the money a contract will pay for a given sort of mission. So the absolute minimum cost to build a ship or outpost to meet the contract conditions may well exceed the advance. Or even the total contract payout in rare cases. Therefore you cannot judge your design on the basis of the contract money - but rather judge the contract on the basis of your best possible design.

[Geschosskopf]

The only real purpose of the advance is that you have to refund it (plus or minus the "contract failure cost" percentage you set in the difficulty options) if you fail or cancel the contract.  So the advance is both part of the total income you can get from the contract, and also potentially as part of the cost (failed rocket + failure pentalty % > 100%)