The tech tree progression is ridiculous

[Wjolcz]

Make it look like this and give us actual freedom of what we want to research next.

And before I get bombarded by "But this is KSP it's not historical!". No, it's not historical and I'm not saying it should be, but that doesn't change the fact that "the tree" is bad and the parts contained in nodes and their progression is ridiculous.

Edited July 26, 2016 by Veeltch

[klgraham1013]

Are you trying to tell me ladders should come sooner than tier 5?  That's like saying wheels should come before tier 7.

Edited July 24, 2016 by klgraham1013

[THX1138]

19 minutes ago, klgraham1013 said:

Are you trying to tell me ladders should come sooner than tier 5?  That's like saying wheels should come before tier 7.

I think their main point is that parts should be unlocked independently instead of in groups?

[klgraham1013]

2 minutes ago, THX1138 said:

I think their main point is that parts should be unlocked independently instead of in groups?

There are many solutions that are better than what we have currently.  They've all been talked about extensively.  None have been implemented.  I can't help but be snarky about it at this point.

Edited July 24, 2016 by klgraham1013

[Rocket In My Pocket]

I have no problems with the current tech tree.

This game is primarily about flying rockets into space, and the progression of the tech tree supports and encourages this.

I'm not sure why everyone has a problem with ladders/wheels being medium tier? Considering you have to upgrade the Astronaut Center to level 2(75,000 Funds) just to go on EVA, and you need a level 2 R&D building(451,000 Funds) to do surface samples. You don't really need ladders for anything meaningful until you have both of these abilities. Likewise, you don't really need to be messing about with wheels until you are more proficient in the basics of the game, if you haven't even landed on the Mun yet, what possible need could you have for a proper rover? (Farming science at the KSC is easily accomplished with jet engines/landing gear.)

[Wjolcz]

1 hour ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

I have no problems with the current tech tree.

This game is primarily about flying rockets into space, and the progression of the tech tree supports and encourages this.

I'm not sure why everyone has a problem with ladders/wheels being medium tier? Considering you have to upgrade the Astronaut Center to level 2(75,000 Funds) just to go on EVA, and you need a level 2 R&D building(451,000 Funds) to do surface samples. You don't really need ladders for anything meaningful until you have both of these abilities. Likewise, you don't really need to be messing about with wheels until you are more proficient in the basics of the game, if you haven't even landed on the Mun yet, what possible need could you have for a proper rover? (Farming science at the KSC is easily accomplished with jet engines/landing gear.)

So does that mean starting manned makes more sense to you than starting unmanned?

Edited July 24, 2016 by Veeltch

[Rocket In My Pocket]

30 minutes ago, Veeltch said:

So does that mean starting manned makes more sense to you than starting unmanned?

Yeah, sure it does, from a game play perspective.

It's a cartooney video game about shooting little green men into space. Shouldn't you be encouraged to use aforementioned little green men from the beginning? Wanting to start unmanned is purely a historical thing, which you stated wasn't your intention.

Not to mention that starting unmanned would require moving batteries and solar panels further down the tree as well. The tech tree is what guides the player through the baby steps, it's essentially a gated tutorial. We want to start new players out with the simplest, purest form of the game; which is strapping Kerbals into rockets and launching them. Then the rest of the games optional bits are slowly opened up, like rovers, airplanes, and unmanned probes.

Edited July 24, 2016 by Rocket In My Pocket

[Wjolcz]

1 hour ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

It's a cartooney video game about shooting little green men into space. Shouldn't you be encouraged to use aforementioned little green men from the beginning? Wanting to start unmanned is purely a historical thing, which you stated wasn't your intention.

Not to mention that starting unmanned would require moving batteries and solar panels further down the tree as well. The tech tree is what guides the player through the baby steps, it's essentially a gated tutorial. We want to start new players out with the simplest, purest form of the game; which is strapping Kerbals into rockets and launching them. Then the rest of the games optional bits are slowly opened up, like rovers, airplanes, and unmanned probes.

I feel like this kind of thinking hurts this game most.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

4 minutes ago, Veeltch said:

I feel like this kind of thinking hurts this game most.

You mean treating it like it's a game?

[Wjolcz]

3 minutes ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

You mean treating it like it's a game?

Treating it like it's a LEGO rockets with wacky, green creatures inside and nothing more.

It doesn't have to make sense. It's wacky.

Edited July 24, 2016 by Veeltch

[Rocket In My Pocket]

5 hours ago, Veeltch said:

And before I get bombarded by "But this is KSP it's not historical!". No, it's not historical and I'm not saying it should be

 

2 minutes ago, Veeltch said:

Treating it like it's a LEGO rockets with wacky, green creatures inside and nothing more.

It doesn't have to make sense. It's wacky.

So are you saying it should or shouldn't be based on realistic historical space flight? I'm getting mixed signals here.

[Wjolcz]

Just now, Rocket In My Pocket said:

 

So are you saying it should or shouldn't be based on realistic historical space flight? I'm getting mixed signals here.

I was being sarcastic in the last post.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

Just now, Veeltch said:

I was being sarcastic in the last post.

Apologies, my sarcasm detector must be on the fritz.

I've explained why I feel the current tech tree is fine based on valid game play reasons. Since this is in fact a video game that's meant to be fun, enjoyable, and as easy to learn as possible, locking more "complex" parts that open up different game play avenues further down the tech tree makes sense to me. Does it make sense in a realistic, historical way? No, not really...but that's not what KSP is intended to be or even should be. (In my opinion.)

If you're saying that thinking of the game as "LEGO rockets with wacky green men" hurts the game, you obviously want it to be more of a simulator I can only assume. Personally I feel like the mod you've mentioned more than covers this avenue for the advanced players who don't need the tech tree "baby sitting" their advancement. I'm not against your opinion, or your idea...I'm just not really for forcing it on new players. I feel there is a good reason SQUAD has designed the tech tree as they have, and that's really all I wanted to say about it. I'm going to refrain from posting anymore as I feel I'm derailing your thread into a personal argument between the two of us. Let's agree to disagree. 

[tater]

The current tech tree is absurd, and is bad for many reasons, including the most important one; it's bad gameplay.

The point of career and the tech tree is to provide constraints on the player such that they have to make pro/con choices to make the completion of missions more challenging. If in career all the parts were unlocked at the first, the Mun ceases to be any sort of challenge. Build a Mun rocket, succeed. Since the game has an implicit "space race" feel (milestones, rescues, etc), but no actual foil, the foil becomes the tech tree... you want to go to the Mun to get "science" to unlock more stuff, but you need to unlock the tools to do so. A better tree would allow for players to pick different paths through the tree to attempt their mission goals. A soviet-style Kerrin-Orbit Rendezvous, vs Direct ascent, vs Munar Orbit Rendezvous, for example, depending on what parts you unlock.

The current tree is just awful in this regard.

Edited July 24, 2016 by tater

[razark]

2 hours ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

The tech tree is what guides the player through the baby steps, it's essentially a gated tutorial.

So career is a tutorial.

When do we get a real career that's not a tutorial?

[tater]

Career should not be a tutorial. 

That's really the problem, I don't think they had much of a plan about what career actually was to be.

I use a "Space Race" example for a number of reasons, and if there was an AI system (including at a "strategic" planning level) I'd happily play such a mode. But take an explicit "race" off the table, and look what sorts of choices a space race puts in front of a player, and see if that describes what career should feel like as a thought experiment realizing that many of the elements of a space race are in fact implicit to KSP career mode.

In a race, you have some finite resources, and you are trying to make these exploration and science milestones before the opposite program. Given your resources, and the technological path you start along, you have to actually make hard choices: go NOW with some real risk of failure, or try and develop a better spacecraft first? It's a real choice, because the opposite program might accept more risk and "win" that milestone. The failure might be... a stranded astronaut. Obviously not a thing in KSP because non-player programs are not stranding astronauts... oh, wait, they are. Milestones imply that there is someone else who might be "first" to the Mun, for example.

OK, so we have no space race, but the race is implicit in KSP regardless. Assume just that, and look at the tech tree, etc. Shouldn't career possibly think in terms of an abstracted race such that the player might get rewarded for making goals in a timely way? A risk/reward system that makes it possibly pay for sending less capable craft, or picking a novel tech path?

[r_rolo1]

7 hours ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

I've explained why I feel the current tech tree is fine based on valid game play reasons. Since this is in fact a video game that's meant to be fun, enjoyable, and as easy to learn as possible, locking more "complex" parts that open up different game play avenues further down the tech tree makes sense to me. Does it make sense in a realistic, historical way? No, not really...but that's not what KSP is intended to be or even should be. (In my opinion.)

Well, the issue is that there is a not so fine line between having parts strategically placed to various places of the tech tree and having them scattered around the tech tree to force players to go everywhere. The second is the exact oposite of any normal game with a tech tree or equivalent does ... most games ( and RL, I might add ) make very that you reap rewards of specializing in between some very distinct branches ( also in most games you have at all times between 5 or 6 choices in the tech tree at all times to promote diversified game play and keep the player with the feel they can actually choose ... ) and yet it is what KSP has at this point: we have both parts sneezed out through the tech tree to basically force the players to go everywhere even if they don't want to ( note that this is not my words ... just rewind to the pre-1.0 dev notes and see what SQUAD says about how the current interaction of the tech tree was chosen ) and basically a railroaded best aproach to it, dictated by the fact that most science gatherers are in a conga line through the tech tree...

Besides that KSP is suposed to be a Tycoon-like game ( BTW SQUAD, I still want to train my astronauts after all this years, and with that I mean something diferent than going to Duna to learn how to change a tyre  ) and any Tycoon game worth his salt has their progression bunched in discrete untis that unlock similar upgrades. Say, using OpenTTD example, you don't start the game with rails and buses and only some years later you learn to make trains and roads ;), Yeat in KSP nowadays, you can easily get locked in a situation where you have to choose between having X m fuel tanks but no X m engines or X m engines and no X m fuel tanks ( again, let me point out this is a deliberate ( and IMHO stupid ) choice to make the players go in fetch parts quests through the tech tree ) and we get stuff bunched in the same tech that has no business going together ( say, that nice tech that unlocks 2 extendable stairs ... and a Mobile crewed Science lab :| One of those things is not like the others, methinks ... ). OFC that being a tycoon like game would also mean that the price structure of parts making and unlocking would also have to be sane, something that it also isn't ( Good ol'Mammoth vs Vector example ... ).

 

P.S I : Getting this balance between having diferentiated branches and keeping the player with 5-6 choices at all times while still keeping a somewhat coherent experience is HARD. There is a reason why game design is a job, and a well paying one  I do not criticize SQUAD for not being able to get it right, but SQUAD made the conscious choice of making people go around the tech tree to fetch parts that were scattered all along with the exact propose of making the players to wander around ( BTW the same strategy they implemented to their comunications with the fanbase: one tidbit in twitter, one on reddit, a crumb in Squadcast ... maybe marketing people think in everything that way nowadays? ( and before someone says anything, this is the official position of SQUAD, by KasperVld mouth, in this forum ) ), a aproach that was doomed from the start to produce the kind of results we have. Well, TBH, in all of this years KSP never really had a game designer that knew it's trade ( with all respect to Harv, but we all know that even Harv agrees that he would had not made some choices he did if he knew what he does today ), so maybe I was expecting too much ...

 

 

P.S II On the manned vs unmanned issue some others brought out: the current state of career mode  makes  that the whole "we need green animated ragdolls in first flight " a little moot , since we can't see them in flight until we upgrade a KSC building. Sure we can see some animated portraits in the bottom right corner in the first flight, but in gamewise visuals it makes very little diference if Jeb is the capsule or sipping coffee in the Mission control reading telemetry in the first flight, because you can't EVA  You could even plast the same portrait in unmanned flights if you really , really want to see kerbals and say that the kerbal you have there  is the Flight controller for that mission

More seriously, the fact that SQUAD chose against all clamors to stick to manned first ( not even manned OR unmanned first ) aproach has has some IMHO bad repercusions on the rest of the game, including on the parts avaliable in game. Say, the RT-5 "Flea" only makes some sense in existing compared with some other probably more useful SRB options ( say, a RT-10 lenght 0,625 m SRB ) because SQUAD wanted to have a SRB for the first flight that could basically send a MK1 capsule to 10 Km if finely tuned ( like the RT-10 did in the soupsphere of old ) and obviously you must have a 1,25m SRB under a 1,25m capsule ... ( again, not my words. In this case Scott Manley and NathanKell ones ). So we ended up stuck with a part that , while useful, probably is taking the place of ther even more useful parts just because Jeb had to be in the first flight.

Other issue is that, IMHO the unmanned rockets are having too much of a nerf already even without forcing the players to not using them in the first flight: manned flights can get more science collecting options than unmanned ones ( crew reports, EVA reports and samples ), 2 of them that can be dialed home without losses. More, most probe bodies are ridiculously underpowered in terms of actual control force even compared with the weakest capsule and even probes + reaction wheels ( that also come somewhat later in tech tree than desirable IMHO ) normally lose to a capsule of the same weight, probes bodies can't store RCS for fine control and , probably the worse, manned missions can reuse two experiments that unmanned missions can't and the data crunching you can do on the  science labs if manned to get even more science you simply can't have in unmanned missions. EDIT: You can also put all of your collected science in a nice reentry worthy manned capsule to 100% recovery in Kerbin, something that you can't do in unmanned missions ... and we know how heat sensitive some science parts are :/

It is really needed to push usable probes to the 4th tier of techs vs the fully controlable manned capsule in 1st iter on top of all of this to balance the rocket equation tyranny? I wonder...

Edited July 25, 2016 by r_rolo1
Added the delivery to Kerbin part

[NSEP]

I first had the same opinion as you my friend, but i changed my mind later. Starting manned makes more sense than starting unmanned in KSP. Why? Because computers and communicator devices are complicated and expensive, but Kerbals are much more efficient than that. But Humans on the other hands, need food, water, shelter and much more. Kerbals are invincible little creatures, they dont need that. 

[razark]

1 hour ago, NSEP said:

Starting manned makes more sense than starting unmanned in KSP. Why?

Some people think the things you point out aren't so much reasons, but things that are wrong with the game.

[Wjolcz]

8 hours ago, NSEP said:

I first had the same opinion as you my friend, but i changed my mind later. Starting manned makes more sense than starting unmanned in KSP. Why? Because computers and communicator devices are complicated and expensive, but Kerbals are much more efficient than that. But Humans on the other hands, need food, water, shelter and much more. Kerbals are invincible little creatures, they dont need that. 

And again: this kind of thinking hurts the game most.

[NSEP]

7 hours ago, razark said:

Some people think the things you point out aren't so much reasons, but things that are wrong with the game.

Those reasons are actually the things that make KSP special in some way. KSP is supposed to be both realistic and cartoony. Not 100% realistic. If KSP should become 100% realistic, they should add RSS, RO and RP-0 in KSP. And KSP is not supposed to be that. But the ability to choose manned or unmanned could be nice.

[Wjolcz]

2 hours ago, NSEP said:

Those reasons are actually the things that make KSP special in some way.

 

2 hours ago, NSEP said:

that make KSP special in some way.

 

2 hours ago, NSEP said:

special

Yeah, it does make it special. In a negative way.

2 hours ago, NSEP said:

If KSP should become 100% realistic, they should add RSS, RO and RP-0 in KSP. And KSP is not supposed to be that.

Nobody said it is.

Edited July 25, 2016 by Veeltch

[klgraham1013]

Something can be cartoony and still have logic behind it.  We see this with KSP physics.  How about we see it with the tech tree as well.

No, I don't think the tech tree is a good tutorial.  Yes, I think the game should start manned, not because of little green men, but because of simplicity.

[Wjolcz]

Just now, klgraham1013 said:

Yes, I think the game should start manned, not because of little green men, but because of simplicity.

Well... if the first capsule you unlock is the inline MK1 cockpit, then I would be cool with that. The planes before rockets is a good approach IMO, but if there was a choice if to start manned or unmanned I would always go unmanned first.

[klgraham1013]

1 minute ago, Veeltch said:

Well... if the first capsule you unlock is the inline MK1 cockpit, then I would be cool with that. The planes before rockets is a good approach IMO, but if there was a choice if to start manned or unmanned I would always go unmanned first.

It's mainly a consideration of how many parts a new player needs to consider at the start of career.  What I would actually like to see is the difficulty settings of KSP being how you start and the scale of the solar system.  Right now, the difficulty is based on how much you need to grind.