Individualize each career playthrough

[illumiz]

I *want* to enjoy progressing through career mode, even though my ultimate goal is always simply to unlock all the parts.  I crave a reason to slog through the tech tree instead of loading up a sandbox game.  Sometimes I think that KSP could offer players like me more satisfaction.  In general I would describe these two suggestions as ways to "individualize" each career mode playthrough, so each iteration of the Space Program is more unique.

First suggestion: give the player random starting Kerbals, and makes Kerbal stats & roles more important.  The idea is to make the player more attached to the employees of their space program.  Currently they feel very interchangeable and impersonal.  It would be great if (for example), when given a certain contract the player would naturally think "X would be perfect for that mission, but Y isn't really suited for it."  To achieve this, give Kerbals randomized personal goals similar to contracts.  Fulfill them in order to level up the Kerbals (instead of the old way of leveling up).  Jeb wants to be the first Kerbal on Minmus, Bill wants to collect atmospheric data from Eve, etc. Could also include negative goals, such as: Jeb hates flying alone (if you send him alone he won't level up), Bob wants to talk to his kids (he won't level up without an antenna on the craft), etc.  Achieving a goal would level up the Kerbal and unlock another goal to be pursued for the next level.  (Bonus idea: generate contracts for specific Kerbals based on their achievements: "Have Jeb take tourists to the site of his historic Minmus landing" etc.)

My other suggestion is the gradual improvement of parts based on their use in the game.  The more often a part is used, the better use your program can make of it.  The idea is that these would be very minor improvements to things like mass, Isp, fuel capacity, drag, etc, and they would be randomized so that each playthrough would offer different bonuses.  Maybe implement it this way: each part has three phases of use: Phase 1 - Experimental, is a short period in which the part is not being used to its full potential and has randomized deficiencies.  A small number of missions that are recovered with the part on board could move it onto Phase 2 - Mass Production, during which the part has "stock" values.  It would take a good amount of use and recovery to move onto Phase 3 - Fine Tuned, when the parts are given randomized bonuses.  I believe that the career game could feel much more rewarding with something like this implemented.

TLDR: the bolded stuff.  Maybe it's too ambitious or against the spirit of the game.  Maybe it's an awesome idea.  I'm just throwing it out there, let me know what you think.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

Great ideas!

Personally I'd love to see both these features in the game as stock.

That said, realistically a mod would be the more likely way to get this in game, I'd certainly be one of the first to D/L something like this if it was a mod for sure.

[Torgo]

I'd take this one step farther... make all the bodies procedural.  Generate a new Kerbin, Mun, Minmus etc... all of them in the same position, but with biomes, resources and most anomalies always in different places from game to game. It would bring some element of discovery back into the game. 

Keep a 'stock' game for new players, so they can reference the existing maps of the current stock worlds if they get stuck. 

An extra challenge, as an added option, would be to have worlds not generate in the same orbit. 

[tater]

To add to Torgo's suggestion (and OP's good post), I would suggest small scale and distance changes at the very least. Anyone who has played with rescale mods knows that you can play with everything bumped up 3.2X and easily play with just stock parts. After a short while you forget 1X was even a thing. It need not rescale the whole system, either. It could alter distances between worlds at D=1 to 4X, for example, then randomly change each world's scale by 1 to D-0.1X (this way rescaled planets will never have their SOI overlap, since the planets all scale less than or equal to distances).

4X might go as high as 6X, but I know 6.4X is hard with stock parts. Perhaps difficulty would alter the upper scale limit. Easy = a max of 2X, Normal is a max of 4X, hard is a max of 6X.

Edited March 13, 2016 by tater

[Andem]

The OP is brilliant. As for changing the planets, eh... It seems like it would be detramental to the game as a whole. If you want that, I'm fairly certain there's already a mod for that.

[tater]

How is optionally changing the planets for replay value bad for the game? 

[Andem]

6 minutes ago, tater said:

How is optionally changing the planets for replay value bad for the game? 

I didn't say anything about replay value...

What I mean is that the Kerbol system has a brand. It's been handcrafted. Aside from that, however, in your post you emphasise the optional nature of the tplanet proposal (which, as I recall, is not mentioned in the OP), not is that not the point of planet packs? The stock Solar system is crafted for players who haven't progressed to a certain point. If a player has grown out of Stock KSP, then they are given the tools to expand the games reaches.

[loch.ness]

Randomized Kerbals:

We sort of have these already only they are the ones we hire.  I like having the "Big 4" in all my saves as they are part of the Dev's intended "shared experience" (see more below).  Now making those randomized Kerbals more unique - Awesome.

Kerbal Goals / Fears (leveling):  This is absolutely brilliant.  I love every part of this idea.

I would add that @Nereid's Final Frontier mod would make an awesome addition to this.  It tracks individual Kerbal's achievements, tracks firsts, and has a nice medal screen so you can look at who the heroes of your program are.

 

Upgrading Parts:  The old plan for the leveling system was a similar type of upgrade system which received huge blow-back from the community because of it breaking the "shared experience."  Now how I would handle this.would be to have the upgrade change the part name slightly.  (Lv909 > Lv910) this way craft can still be shared for sandbox mode while the upgrades would also fit nicely into Career.

Personal addition:  I'd love if textures were connected to above allowing early career to have the "stuff thrown together" look with mismatching textures/colors/design ideas and late game had tools to toggle between textures (through using upgraded variants or just making texture tweakable) to make really sleak/professional looking rockets.

 

 

[tater]

1 hour ago, Andem said:

I didn't say anything about replay value...

What I mean is that the Kerbol system has a brand. It's been handcrafted. Aside from that, however, in your post you emphasise the optional nature of the tplanet proposal (which, as I recall, is not mentioned in the OP), not is that not the point of planet packs? The stock Solar system is crafted for players who haven't progressed to a certain point. If a player has grown out of Stock KSP, then they are given the tools to expand the games reaches.

Individualizing each play though suggests someone playing through more than once. After a couple random kerbal astronauts, you're back at square one. You know exactly what is needed to do A or B. Your first Mun landing was kind of exciting... how is the 100th?

My first 6.4X Mun landing was pretty exciting, however. The game has no sense of exploration after you've seen anything at least once.

[juanml82]

10 minutes ago, tater said:

Individualizing each play though suggests someone playing through more than once. After a couple random kerbal astronauts, you're back at square one. You know exactly what is needed to do A or B. Your first Mun landing was kind of exciting... how is the 100th?

I've been to Moho a few times. This weekend I've send a rover with a narrow band scanner and a surface scanner I've designed, and I broke it's wheels when landing - twice. I also send a manned mission via Eve, which was painstakingly slow to turn because I had forgotten to add reaction wheels to the transfer stage so it only had the small wheels in the lander. And since I made a narrow, tall lander in an asparagus staging, not only the first asparagus stage (which has half the landing legs) empties during the descend forcing me to take that dead weight down, the lander tumbled when it hit the ground.

So I reloaded the quicksave and I'm considering not bothering with landing that particular lander.

 

So, if you play perfectly, yeah, maybe your 12th manned mission to Moho is the same as the third. But if you make mistakes, maybe it isn't.

[tater]

Agreed, I've taken to trying to make everything exciting by only playing with life support. I will test certain craft like landers using hyperedit, given hat I use scaled up systems most of the time, too, but I always send unmanned probes first, often several. Even a Duna return is sort of a big deal with 6.4X and life support.

My diff levels could be scaled so that Easy=normal kerbol system, Normal = everything scaled up 1-3X, and Hard maybe everything is 3-6X (with caveats for the tiny worlds like Gilly so they stay appropriately tiny).

[Andem]

1 hour ago, tater said:

My diff levels could be scaled so that Easy=normal kerbol system, Normal = everything scaled up 1-3X, and Hard maybe everything is 3-6X (with caveats for the tiny worlds like Gilly so they stay appropriately tiny).

Now yhat I definitely agree with.