Constant Career Restart Syndrome

[Bombaatu]

(insert sad music here)

Hello. I'm Bombaatu & I suffer from Constant Career Restart Syndrome (CCRS). I get to a certain point in a career game & for <reason>, I abandon it and start another. I keep telling myself "Not this time... this time, I'm gonna keep playing this one!"; and yet... I never do. 

The reasons vary, but usually have to do with the mix of mods I am using. I try to start minimally, but then the "Oh, but I need this one!" bug hits me. And then "But I should have had this from the beginning! Now I've missed out on <thing>!" And the cycle starts anew...

Are there other CCRS sufferers out there? For those who have healed themselves of this terrible affliction, what course of treatment do you recommend?

[fourfa]

I don't see what's the problem

[monstah]

36 minutes ago, Bombaatu said:

Are there other CCRS sufferers out there?

I'd guess, only most of us?

[A_name]

Hi, my name is A_Name and I too am a new-career-starting-holic. I have to admit I have never even unlocked the full tech tree.

Edited February 16, 2017 by A_name

[Snark]

1 hour ago, Bombaatu said:

Are there other CCRS sufferers out there? For those who have healed themselves of this terrible affliction, what course of treatment do you recommend?

Never seems to hit me.  I start a career, play it through until it's "done" (which varies based on ambition and available free time, but is usually at least a couple of months), then start a new one.

Lots of words below, but if I had to offer a piece of advice, it would be:  Plan your career ahead of time, and specifically decide what is your "done" condition when you decide "I win" and move on to a new career.

Okay, now the verbose details.  Speculations as to why I never seem to have this problem:

First... I've been playing KSP for a while.  Nearly three years of active playing, around two years of being active on the forums.  So I've got a pretty good handle on what's out there and which mods are available to do what.  So it's highly unlikely that I'll get midway through a career and discover something shiny that I "should have had from the start":  if it were that important, I would have already known about it and used it from the get-go.

Second... I don't know how other folks approach careers, but for me:  whenever I start a career, I go into it already having a very definite idea in mind what the "story arc" will be for the career.  I decide in advance which major career-defining mods I'll be using.  Will it have life support, or not?  Will it be in the stock solar system, or a modded one?  And, if the latter, which one (OPM, New Horizons, Galileo's Planet Pack)?  Will I run KAS?  Extraplanetary Launchpads?  And so forth. In addition to deciding ahead of time which gameplay-defining mods I'll run, I also have an idea in my head of the "plot of the novel":  what's the big, majestic goal of the career?

That's really important, because I want to know in advance what "done" looks like for that career.  That's probably the single most important decision I make before I start.  I set a goal that determines what "done" is, and I work towards that.  That way, I know when I'm done and it's time to end the career and move on to a new one.  "Done" may be something different for different careers.

Example of a typical career plan in spoiler:

Spoiler

Suppose I choose to run OPM (so there are lots of nice juicy planets with plenty of moons out on the outer limits of the solar system) and Extraplanetary Launchpads (so I can build ships off-Kerbin).  I might define my story arc (before I start the career) like this:

1. Preliminary goal:  Build a base on Minmus, as early as possible (i.e. as soon as I have the bare minimum tech needed), which is capable of building and launching its own ships.
2. Build a single big "mothership" mission and send it to the outer solar system with all of my kerbals aboard, abandoning the base.  No more launches from Kerbin's SoI.
3. Completely explore Sarnus, Urlum, and Neidon, with all their moons,  The mothership can build exploration vessels, and even replacements for itself, along the way.
4. When it's all done, bring them triumphantly home with a mega-load of science.
5. Done!

That's just one example of a possible career plan.  Every time I start a new career, I try to mix things up (different combination of mods, different story arc) in some original fashion that I haven't played before-- that's what keeps KSP fresh for me, so that I'm not tired of playing it even after three years.

So... how does that inoculate me against Constant Career Restart Syndrome?

Well, I think it helps in a couple of ways:

First, whenever I'm playing a career, I'm doing so with a definite gameplay style and goal in mind.  By analogy with, say, shopping, my career is like going into the store with a shopping list, and the goal of "get into the store, grab everything on my list, and get out, as efficiently as possible."  What I'm not doing is just browsing and window shopping and looking at all the shiny objects.  I'm searching, not browsing.  Therefore, I'm unlikely to get distracted by something I see along the way.  If I happen to see some especially shiny new toy I hadn't been aware of, I don't abandon my shopping trip-- I just make a note of it and decide I'll take a look at it the next time I visit the store.

Second, and perhaps even more importantly:  I always know I'll be finishing my current career reasonably soon.  That's because I decide, before starting, what the "done" condition is; I know what goal I'm working towards.  The career isn't open-ended; it has a finite lifespan, decided in advance.  I know that I'm going to be accomplishing the goal and "winning" in a bounded time period.  Depending on how ambitious this particular career is, it might be a month, it might be two months, it might be longer-- but it's not just going to go on and on indefinitely.  So, since I know that it's going to end in a reasonable time frame, that means I have less temptation to abandon it if I discover something shiny.  "Oh, look at that!  That's cool, I could totally use that as the linchpin of a career!  Okay, I'll make a note of it, and I'll work it into the game plan for my next career."

I think the only time I've ever abandoned a career is when I discover that my plan is a lot less fun than I expected, and that I'm not enjoying it-- i.e. I made a mistake when I planned things out.  Example in spoiler:

Spoiler

For example, I had a career that I decided was going to be full-bore MKS/OKS, with TAC Life Support and Extraplanetary Launchpads, with the goal of building a fully self-sustaining mothership that could explore the whole system.  It sounded good "on paper".  Neat!  Complex logistics!  Keeping track of lots of things, to feed my OCD!  What fun it will be, right?

What I didn't bargain for, though, is that it turned out that MKS/OKS really wasn't my cup of tea.

I chose it because of the complex logistics (which I thought would be a fun challenge), but it ended up being much less fun for me than I expected.  "Hey, why am I not enjoying this?"  I finally realized that it was because MKS/OKS changes KSP into a very different sort of game entirely, where it's almost entirely about resource management and logistics instead of flying rocket ships.  Since "flying rocket ships" is what KSP is all about for me, that's why it became un-fun.

(Not that there's anything wrong with MKS/OKS itself-- it does what it sets out to do, very well.  It's just that it's really not my thing, and I didn't realize that until I started playing it and got halfway into a career.)

As soon as I realized "I'm not enjoying this", and the reason why, it became clear that the problem was unfixable because the very thing that was sapping my enjoyment was the exact thing that was the centerpiece of the whole career-- that was the point.

So I abandoned that career immediately, without a backward glance, and rolled a new one.

That happens pretty rarely, though-- I'm a fairly careful person, and if I'm putting together a career out of new elements I haven't used before, I generally do a fair amount of research in advance, so that I have a good idea how much fun it'll be for me. 

[monstah]

1 minute ago, Snark said:

Never seems to hit me.  I start a career, play it through until it's "done" (which varies based on ambition and available free time, but is usually at least a couple of months), then start a new one.

1 hour ago, Bombaatu said:

Hello. I'm Bombaatu & I suffer from Constant Career Restart Syndrome (CCRS). I get to a certain point in a career game & for <reason>, I abandon it and start another. I keep telling myself "Not this time... this time, I'm gonna keep playing this one!"; and yet... I never do. 

The reasons vary, (...)

Well, you do suffer from it, it's just that you just get to feel accomplished in the meantime  

 

4 minutes ago, Snark said:

Second... I don't know how other folks approach careers, but for me:  whenever I start a career, I go into it already having a very definite idea in mind what the "story arc" will be for the career.  I decide in advance which major career-defining mods I'll be using.  Will it have life support, or not?  Will it be in the stock solar system, or a modded one?  And, if the latter, which one (OPM, New Horizons, Galileo's Planet Pack)?  Will I run KAS?  Extraplanetary Launchpads?  And so forth. In addition to deciding ahead of time which gameplay-defining mods I'll run, I also have an idea in my head of the "plot of the novel":  what's the big, majestic goal of the career?

That's really important, because I want to know in advance what "done" looks like for that career.  That's probably the single most important decision I make before I start.  I set a goal that determines what "done" is, and I work towards that.  That way, I know when I'm done and it's time to end the career and move on to a new one.  "Done" may be something different for different careers.

This, however, is golden advice. I've never thought of it that way. Thank you yet again for your Snarky wisdom (do you ever run out of it??)

[Snark]

1 hour ago, monstah said:

Well, you do suffer from it, it's just that you just get to feel accomplished in the meantime

Not in the slightest.  The problem that the OP is complaining about isn't "I want to have one career that lasts forever and that doesn't happen."  The problem is "I find myself constantly restarting my career when I think I shouldn't be, when I'm not really ready for it."  He literally said that he tells himself that he won't, and then feels bad when he does.

Which is not my case at all.  My careers last a pretty long time, and they only end when I want them to and have planned, long in advance, for them to end.

Or, if you prefer, I could put it this way:  No, I don't suffer from it.  I revel in it. 

 

Anyway, I know that my play style isn't for everyone.  For example, there are people out there who like to have super long-running careers that go on for years, and basically never end-- it's an ongoing saga, like a soap opera, and they maintain it across multiple KSP major version updates, and so forth.  My solution wouldn't work for someone like that.  Fortunately for me, that's not a play style I've ever had any interest in myself, so I don't have that problem.

 

1 hour ago, monstah said:

(do you ever run out of it??)

Nope.  (Though sometimes my friends and loved ones kinda wish that I would, once in a while...)

[Guest]

Most of the time this has happened to me has been because about halfway through grinding all the building upgrades and doing contracts I care precisely zero about I realized that career mode was stupid. This has also happened to me with RP-0, only it's slightly more pronounced because of the presence of KCT which results in an abnormally large early to mid-game slump where the only real option is to simply keep launching sat contracts to accumulate cash.

I gave all that up and started a science mode game, and I am much happier with the progress and freedom I have to direct the space program. I can launch whatever payloads I want to where ever I want without trying to get the right kinds of contracts to make those payloads economical or trying to cram some idiotic part onto a mission that I'd much rather have doing something else.

Not sure if that'll help you but, in my experience, if you enjoy actually directing a space program career mode is not for you.

[Snark]

23 minutes ago, regex said:

I realized that career mode was stupid.

...if you enjoy actually directing a space program career mode is not for you.

In general, you raise an excellent point, namely, "career mode isn't for everybody."

I'd hesitate to call it "stupid".  There are lots of KSP players who love playing career mode, for good reasons (I'm one of them), and I hardly think those players are "stupid".  And there are also lots of players who can't stand it, for good reasons (you're one of them), and those folks aren't "stupid", either.  It's simply a difference of tastes.

I like directing a space program, and I like career mode.  Nothing wrong with that. 

But certainly, your central point that career mode's not for everyone is worth considering, for someone who has issues with it.  Though "just play in sandbox mode" may or may not solve the OP's problem-- I get the impression that their problem isn't 100% restarting career, per se, but rather, restarting a save game.

For example:  When I play, I like to play in career mode.  Why?  Simply because I happen to enjoy the part of career that you hate:  climbing the tech tree and running contracts for cash and upgrading stuff and so forth.  But given the way I play, probably 70% or more of my career's total play time happens after I've already maxed out the tech tree and have earned enough cash that I have millions sitting in the bank and can pretty much build whatever I want.  Once it gets to that point, the game play is essentially indistinguishable from sandbox.

Suppose I didn't enjoy that initial climb.  Well then, yeah, I'd probably play science or sandbox rather than career, so that I could just skip the initial slog and get to the "good stuff", right?

But... my basic play style would still be the same.  I would still start a new savegame (a "career" de facto, if not de jure) with an idea of having a pre-defined, finite story arc with a "done" condition, and I would play that way until I accomplished that, and then I'd start over again.

So I'd say that "career versus science versus sandbox", while an important game decision, is somewhat orthogonal to the particular issue that the OP is up against, here.

[Human Person]

Totally get you. My current solution is going back to Stock (except for Kerbal Engineer and Scansat. 

Mods I have been installing, uninstalling, installing, ... al the time are e.g.. KW Rocketry, Unmanned before Manned and KIS, KAS so mainly mods that include a lot of parts. Maybe thats the flaw.

[Guest]

Just now, Snark said:

There are lots of KSP players who love playing career mode, for good reasons (I'm one of them), and I hardly think those players are "stupid".

Then you should play career mode and feel good about enjoying it while understanding my comment wasn't directed at you. I can read myriad comments about how sandbox is easy mode with no restrictions and how people can't seem to find any real reason to play it without taking offense for all the sandbox players essentially being called "lazy and undisciplined". People play the game differently.

Just now, Snark said:

I get the impression that their problem isn't 100% restarting career, per se, but rather, restarting a save game.

vOv I was speaking more from my experience that trying a different game mode rekindled my desire to have a long-running save (might also possibly have something to do with 1.2.2 feeling like an actual, stable release). I'm quite good at spinning up a save for a particular mission in sandbox, and that mostly happens in RO/RSS or when trying something out in vanilla that was posted on the forums. But with career mode in particular I always hit a grind slump. I switched over to science mode for my current save and have been very interested in the game despite hitting the 550 research node wall where I have to reach further for longer to unlock less.

In the old days when we could only play sandbox mode I'd keep a single save per version of KSP.

Just now, Snark said:

climbing the tech tree

I don't hate that part at all.

Just now, Snark said:

"career versus science mode versus sandbox"

FTFY

[UnknowingTea]

I have this problem. Funny thing is that it happens around the same time in each career. I make it to a manned landing and return from Duna, and then I think "how can I make this harder?" I'm at this stage of my current game which is hard mode with life support. It recently occurred to me that I could do an unmanned-only game with kOS and no human input after launch (except reprogramming). I think I'll be starting over soon. 

[The Aziz]

...and I'm the exact opposite here. It's 2017 and I'm still playing my first career started back in 1.0

Probably because I don't play too much, but I don't think I have finished it yet. And that will happen when, and only when, my last Kerbal returns home from last mission to last celestial body.

K, except Eve. He's not coming back anytime soon. 

[Nuclear_Pixel]

Did I post this? Under a different name? In my sleep??

[Whisky Tango Foxtrot]

I'm actually looking forward to restarting my game. I'm still currently playing my original all-stock career save but I keep getting the itch to go back and see how I'd go through the early parts of the tech tree knowing what I know now, and to start trying out mods. However, I've set myself the goal of sticking with this save until I've "completed" it, which in my case means maxing out the tech tree (already done,) building bases on Duna and Laythe and putting flags and footprints on every other solid body in the Kerbol system (still ongoing.)

[Allocthonous]

I am somewhat guilty of this, but I usually start a new career game because I have a goal or theme in mind for that particular space program. I started one game focused on exploring Dres and its asteroids, one for Duna, one for messing around with higher commnet difficulty settings...you get the idea.

[jhousen]

mine usually goes something like: base exploded on load -f9 to three real weeks before the incident... new game

I really need to quicksave more often

[Blasty McBlastblast]

I find myself constantly restarting careers, mostly for the following reasons:

1. extra design challenge imposed by having restrictions for mass, parts count, and availability of parts.
2. role-playing the development of rocket technology (once I get too far up the tech tree things can feel a little easy!)
3. second install to attempt a challenge, which leads too...
4. spent too long away from career game, forgot what i was doing.. start over! (also happens when real life keeps me away from gaming)
5. one time, after (stupidly) killing a whole bunch of kermen I felt so bad that I started over, rather than have to inform the families...
6. mod it 'till it breaks... then start over!  (lol also installing a clean copy of ksp feels great, like smelling freshly opened stationary!)
7. squad drops a new version, breaking everything... (see point 6)

One day I'll get around to sticking-with and "completing" a career that does it all and goes everywhere, but I may be waiting until retirement to get enough free time!

Actually i think i might start a fresh game right now to do this!! 

[archnem]

I also suffer from this affliction - I was just talking to my brother about this last Sunday.

 

The biggest problem is that career mode needs a major overhaul, which it is not likely to get.  All the fun in career is in the early stages, when you're really having to watch your budget and make tough decisions about engineering to make things happen.  Once you get past a certain point, it just becomes a grindfest.  I love playing on a budget, but the current career mode is just unsatisfying.  I've thought about writing a mod to make career mode better, but it would be so comprehensive, I don't think it would be within my capabilities, and even if it were it would be so time consuming, I doubt I would actually want to play KSP anymore.  So just embrace the fact that career mode sucks, that all the fun is in the first couple of tech tree tiers, and if you want to do something really engineering-heavy, you'll have to play sandbox.

[DerekL1963]

1 hour ago, archnem said:

All the fun in career is in the early stages, when you're really having to watch your budget and make tough decisions about engineering to make things happen.  Once you get past a certain point, it just becomes a grindfest.

0.o  I find that the grind vanishes from the midgame onwards...  without much trouble you have kash coming out your ears, especially once you max out the tree and can turn science into kash.
 

1 hour ago, Blasty McBlastblast said:

role-playing the development of rocket technology (once I get too far up the tech tree things can feel a little easy!)

Me, I find myself trying harder things...

[SickSix]

I haven't started too many careers but I have never finished one. I have never fully unlocked the tech tree that I can recall. Maybe way way back before it had some of the higher end parts available now. 

 

My last career was my best. Made it to Duna. But, had a horrible, irreversible accident that stranded,  then killed Val. I think that event basically killed that game for me. I tried to trudge on but lost motivation.  

Took a long break and 1.2 was released. So I feel like I need a new start with the new features. I just want to get a Duna ground base and I will feel finished.

[tater]

I play career every new update, and I have of late been testing SSTU in career with every SSTU update to make sure stuff works/appears/etc. So new update, new career.

Career mode is awful. I play it because I want a career mode that isn't awful, but of course the career mode is awful, so I am quickly reminded it is.

It's certainly possible to fake a career/campaign mode in sandbox by limiting what you do, and following a sort of script, but that has no chance of failure, either (just like career mode has no real chance of failure). I don't see it as possible to fix for a few reasons, frankly.

One, there is an implied competition in KSP where one does not exist at all. "First" milestones? Who came in second? If it takes you 10,000 years to get to orbit, you're still the first. Huzzah.

Two, the contract paradigm is fundamentally a bad one.

Three, no equipment failures means that career play is always identical, and there are no technology trade offs in the game that involve safety/reliability (which is of critical importance in real life---and more importantly, it's interesting).

Four, there is no sense of discovery ("fog of war") since everything is always the same.

[jhousen]

yup, just don't consider it a problem.  time to restart

Edited February 26, 2017 by jhousen
none

[Mad_Scientist]

I also do have this syndrome. Every time I advance myself into the end of the tech tree, I have a nostalgia about the beginning of the game, when you need to think how to achieve what you want with minimal capabilities. And now thanks to you, I have this urge to start again...

[Curveball Anders]

I tend to restart or at least start a new save (and often forgetting about the old one) when there's either a new release and/or I've decided to add (or remove) some major mod(s).