[SUGGESTION] Career Mode and Funds in KSP 2 and issues, that come with removing them from the game.

[RyanRising]

5 hours ago, dnbattley said:

[some names snipped so as not to ping them again] Please allow me to clarify that I neither object to, nor offer judgement on, players spending millions of credits building super-size rockets and missions. My point was that design efficiency and cost-related compromise is a fact of (real) life and, for me, the additional restrictions in career mode offer an additional dimension of play, not present in other modes, which I appreciate, and which has heightened my awareness of such inefficiencies.

I personally believe starting in career has dramatically benefited my design building skills, which persist even when playing in sandbox, as I now more commonly do.

Sorry, I wasn’t trying to counter your point with that, just perhaps make someone chuckle. I agree about building cost-effective ships being more satisfying and interesting than just plain effective ones, and it does seem KSP2 would be remiss not to tap into that somehow. Of course KSP’s career implementation is flawed, but even in light of what has been said about adventure mode I don’t anticipate that they’ll be throwing the baby out with the bath water there. For more unique, intelligent, and nuanced takes on this topic, the rest of this thread has you covered. 

[harrisjosh2711]

I once spent an entire playthrough funding myself through mining. Cant do that without money. Ksp2 will lose replay value without currency.

[AlamoVampire]

1 hour ago, harrisjosh2711 said:

I once spent an entire playthrough funding myself through mining. Cant do that without money. Ksp2 will lose replay value without currency.

Sorry but imho you are 100% wrong. I got KSP in July 2013 days (2-3) after version 0.21 was released. We are now just shy of 7 YEARS since I came into KSP. I abjectly refuse to play career mode for the litany of reasons I listed in prior posts in this very thread. I play exclusively sand box. I see no loss in playability from not using funds. 
 

To you funds are replayability. To me they are pointless. The fact that we are polar opposites in our opinion makes a sweeping statement like yours, well, moot. I would say incorrect but, that too would be sweepingly broad for the same exact reason. 
 

192106212020

[mcwaffles2003]

8 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

To you funds are replayability. To me they are pointless. The fact that we are polar opposites in our opinion makes a sweeping statement like yours, well, moot. I would say incorrect but, that too would be sweepingly broad for the same exact reason. 

But funds push a player to build efficiently. If funding were not part of the game people off the bat could just build 1,000 ton monstrosities to get to the moon with 15,000 dV to spare. Thats fine if that's what you came to KSP to do and sandbox mode is there for that, but largely people playing career mode are looking to play under certain constraints and limitations imposed on them that they have to overcome.

8 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

I abjectly refuse to play career mode for the litany of reasons I listed in prior posts in this very thread. I play exclusively sand box. I see no loss in playability from not using funds. 

Then why are you arguing so adamantly about a mode you have no interest in playing?

8 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

192106212020

Also, whats with these numbers you keep posting? Are you just making a note to self for when, exactly, you made a post? Because the forum already does that with accuracy to the day.

[dnbattley]

2 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

Also, whats with these numbers you keep posting? Are you just making a note to self for when, exactly, you made a post? Because the forum already does that with accuracy to the day.

Also... ISO-8601, amiright?

[AlamoVampire]

@mcwaffles2003 going top down through your post.

1. Constraints are fine. I am all for structure. Career mode is poorly made. It is illogical in its progression and completely lacks a reason to be invested from lack of story. My opinion ofc.

2. Why do I argue against career mode given my refusal to play it? Because I was at one point so exceptionally excited to see it and so utterly devastated by the horror of what we got. It is also why I am vocal in my support of the inferior mess that is stock fairings (my distaste for stock fairings comes from how unintuitive, how utterly clunky and ugly stock is <just a few examples> compared to the gold standard imho that Procedural Fairings is) to be replaced by Procedural Fairings. I would link you to them, but check kottabos games channel on youtube. His video on them (redone in 2019 it seems) is fairly good on it.

3. @dnbattley since you commented on my numbers by way of quoting mcwaffles2003’s question on it i will ping you too  those numbers are a personal time/date stamp. Its my way of keeping exact records of when I post something. The forum has been known to eat threads and accounts (its done it once or twice that I know of) when it glitched hard during a move of some sort iirc. I just think im dorky to do it, but hey, why not right?

 

063806222020

[Guest]

4 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

But funds push a player to build efficiently. If funding were not part of the game people off the bat could just build 1,000 ton monstrosities to get to the moon with 15,000 dV to spare. Thats fine if that's what you came to KSP to do and sandbox mode is there for that, but largely people playing career mode are looking to play under certain constraints and limitations imposed on them that they have to overcome.

Then why are you arguing so adamantly about a mode you have no interest in playing?

Also, whats with these numbers you keep posting? Are you just making a note to self for when, exactly, you made a post? Because the forum already does that with accuracy to the day.

Just like a fixed narrative it's not the only possible progression nor the best one for KSP (emergent narrative is) funds and science are not the only possible way of implementing a good progression system.

I don't think there will be no money in KSP2 but I can understand the reasoning behind the idea of removing them, it's an obstacle to the early game that get completely replaced by resources once you set-up your first orbital shipyard or colonial VAB.

Just like a badly implemented life support system could simply delete any possibility of a "real" rescue mission a bad implementation of funds early in the game can force the player to rely too much on the revert function killing the potential for emergent gameplay later on.

Example:

Bad implementation of money: the game forces you to rely on revert for everything to avoid bankrupting your space program, you never fail, the game has to spawn endangered kerbals and make a contract for you to save them.

Good implementation: the money system is balanced around the possibility of loveups (I don't how, I'm not a game designer) to deemphasize the use of the revert function.

When Mark W. Kerman get stuck on Duna instead of reverting the whole thing it comes more natural for you to plan a daring rescue mission.

That rescue becomes one of your most fond gaming memories because it's your story and not a cold quest BG written by someone else.

Edited June 22, 2020 by Guest
Lol at loveups being censored with Loveups

[magnemoe]

23 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

Sorry but imho you are 100% wrong. I got KSP in July 2013 days (2-3) after version 0.21 was released. We are now just shy of 7 YEARS since I came into KSP. I abjectly refuse to play career mode for the litany of reasons I listed in prior posts in this very thread. I play exclusively sand box. I see no loss in playability from not using funds. 
 

To you funds are replayability. To me they are pointless. The fact that we are polar opposites in our opinion makes a sweeping statement like yours, well, moot. I would say incorrect but, that too would be sweepingly broad for the same exact reason. 
 

192106212020

As I see it the main problem with carrier mode is kerbal cost, this tend to be the limiting factors as kerbals fast become more expensive than bases if you expand fast up to the level I'm at now there they cost more than fleets. 
Hardware was not an problem once KSC was fully build. 
 

[AlamoVampire]

@magnemoe i do not know if you have read all 3 or so pages of this thread, frankly I would not blame you if you have not. But, rather than I write it again, I direct you to my post on page 2, with my timestamp: 134906202020. It is my first entry in this thread itself. I think you may be overlooking the issues laid out there. If I have however misread your meaning and those issues I lay out in said post are not issues to you, I apologize for the misunderstanding.

 

212206222020

[harrisjosh2711]

On 6/21/2020 at 8:21 PM, AlamoVampire said:

Sorry but imho you are 100% wrong. I got KSP in July 2013 days (2-3) after version 0.21 was released. We are now just shy of 7 YEARS since I came into KSP. I abjectly refuse to play career mode for the litany of reasons I listed in prior posts in this very thread. I play exclusively sand box. I see no loss in playability from not using funds. 
 

To you funds are replayability. To me they are pointless. The fact that we are polar opposites in our opinion makes a sweeping statement like yours, well, moot. I would say incorrect but, that too would be sweepingly broad for the same exact reason. 
 

192106212020

So you dont even know what you're missing if you "refuse to play career mode". Big time fallacy, your argument is illogical and unsound.

If you ever want a different experience you can play career. You can consider this "replay value". If career didnt exist you couldnt. Hence why i am 98% correct in my argument. You're basically just trying to push your playstyle as superior.  And it almost seems like you want ksp to go backwards, no science or contracts since those have no gameplay function in sandbox. (Some people enjoy science mode for this reason)

Further, Its easy to cheat money into a game or outright disable it (if sandbox is your thing). It's next to impossible to mod in an entire currency system thats compatible with thousands of mods. So once again, please quit pushing your play style.

Lastly, Im sure currency is replaced with something. Cant think of a single game, besides ksp, where everything is free and half the mechanics are pointless. Thats lame. Makes sense for ksp since sandbox was released far before ksp was a complete game. 

Edited June 24, 2020 by harrisjosh2711

[SOXBLOX]

All this about funds and efficient building seems to ignore the fact that when there are no funds, there is no such thing as "efficient building" . Thus the name of the funds-less game, sandbox.

[AlamoVampire]

46 minutes ago, harrisjosh2711 said:

So you dont even know what you're missing if you "refuse to play career mode". Big time fallacy, your argument is illogical and unsound.

I am going to stop you right here. Let me correct you. I have tried career. When it FIRST CAME OUT. I spent an hour playing it that day. I found it COMPLETELY wanting in EVERY aspect: no story. No logical progression in either contracts or tech progression. I said its a first iteration, lets see what next patch does. Next patch? No improvement. Another hour spent. Said to myself one more try at next patch. Next patch? One last hour, no improvement. Gave up. There is no fallacy in my stance. The only mistake is a misunderstanding and i think it was born likely of you not seeing my post where i had stated this. Given this thread is 3 pages its an honest one.

230906232020

231606232020

fixed ending content in my edit

Edited June 24, 2020 by AlamoVampire

[Hallahan]

Literally made post a minute about the same opinion and with other opinions. And I just noticed this lmao.

[harrisjosh2711]

16 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

I am going to stop you right here. Let me correct you. I have tried career. When it FIRST CAME OUT. I spent an hour playing it that day. I found it COMPLETELY wanting in EVERY aspect: no story. No logical progression in either contracts or tech progression. I said its a first iteration, lets see what next patch does. Next patch? No improvement. Another hour spent. Said to myself one more try at next patch. Next patch? One last hour, no improvement. Gave up. There is no fallacy in my stance. The only mistake is a misunderstanding and i think it was born likely of you not seeing my post where i had stated this. Given this thread is 3 pages its an honest one.

230906232020

231606232020

fixed ending content in my edit

Ah, well, i will agree with you that career was poorly implemented. I usually role play (paying myself for missions i want to accomplish) and completely avoid the contract system, for the most part. So long as something replaces currency i will be content. The more i think about it universal currency doesnt make sense for colonies and such. Its a space game not an industrial stimulator.

[The Flying Kerbal]

I'm curious AlamoVampire, have you ever tried RSS-RP1?  Looking at it being played on Youtube, it might give you the progression you consider lacking in regular KSP.

[AlamoVampire]

4 hours ago, The Flying Kerbal said:

I'm curious AlamoVampire, have you ever tried RSS-RP1?  Looking at it being played on Youtube, it might give you the progression you consider lacking in regular KSP.

Actually no. Before February of this year i played on a potato. That changed when in January I had a pc built by a friend that was purpose built to exceed the needs of a game called DCS World. I had to choose mods carefully, and ones with tons of dependencies or added too much draw on my machines capabilities went unused. Given my view of the failures of career and my preference of sandbox, i still see no need. Fwiw rss-rp1 looks interesting, but, im an old fart of sorts and enjoy: mechjeb, chatterer, proc fairings, kis, kas, planetary base. Those mods + sandbox give me a ksp experience that i fully enjoy. Hope that makes/made sense.

 

231406242020

[The Flying Kerbal]

6 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

Actually no. Before February of this year i played on a potato. That changed when in January I had a pc built by a friend that was purpose built to exceed the needs of a game called DCS World. I had to choose mods carefully, and ones with tons of dependencies or added too much draw on my machines capabilities went unused. Given my view of the failures of career and my preference of sandbox, i still see no need. Fwiw rss-rp1 looks interesting, but, im an old fart of sorts and enjoy: mechjeb, chatterer, proc fairings, kis, kas, planetary base. Those mods + sandbox give me a ksp experience that i fully enjoy. Hope that makes/made sense.

 

231406242020

Yes, very clear answer.  I don't think I'm really good enough for RSS just yet, but it does look cool - one day I'll give it a go.

[pss88]

New dev video is out. It somewhat confirmed, that every part will have cost! In the video Nose Cone part costs 111 ore and 11.1 uranium.

[Guest]

55 minutes ago, pss88 said:

New dev video is out. It somewhat confirmed, that every part will have cost! In the video Nose Cone part costs 111 ore and 11.1 uranium.

Now that we have multiple resources officially confirmed I'm starting to think that there could indeed be no money in the game.

They stated that it will be impossible to reach a "game over" state, how to do that while also keeping a deep and complex gameplay?

Off Kerbin VABs and orbital shipyards.

 

SPECULATION

No money, parts only cost resources but resources are free on Kerbin.

Your technological progression will still be driven by exploration with science points or something similar, but bases and stations will have a central part in progression.

Yai! Neil and Buzz Kerman will make their historical first steps for free, but where's the difficulty?

Well, bases, station and colonies needs a constant flow of resources to properly function at peak efficiency and the resources to expand colonies and launch rockets from them are obviously not free.

Sure, you can launch supplies from Kerbin but that takes time (even when automatically repeating missions through the supply line system) and probably there will be limits on some resources or a timed spawn rate to make offworld mining desirable.

Also bring everything from Kerbin for free will be less and less attractive as you get far from it and a missed suply dtart taking months or years to arrive.

That would automatically generate a lot of missions to set-up every new colony to be self-sufficient and have a decent amount of resources in storage to build and launch your next mission.

Edit: you could also add refinement processes initially impossibile to do off-world, forcing you to mine raw resources, ship them to Kerbin and then ship back the refined product to your colonies.

Edited June 25, 2020 by Guest

[Acid_Burn9]

So guys this is a glimpse of new KSP 2 Developer Update 1.5 video.



Parts are in fact balanced by their cost in resources, just as i suggested. I can sleep in peace now!

(still hope that funds make it into the game tho)

Edited June 25, 2020 by Acid_Burn9

[Incarnation of Chaos]

2 hours ago, Master39 said:

Now that we have multiple resources officially confirmed I'm starting to think that there could indeed be no money in the game.

They stated that it will be impossible to reach a "game over" state, how to do that while also keeping a deep and complex gameplay?

Off Kerbin VABs and orbital shipyards.

 

SPECULATION

No money, parts only cost resources but resources are free on Kerbin.

Your technological progression will still be driven by exploration with science points or something similar, but bases and stations will have a central part in progression.

Yai! Neil and Buzz Kerman will make their historical first steps for free, but where's the difficulty?

Well, bases, station and colonies needs a constant flow of resources to properly function at peak efficiency and the resources to expand colonies and launch rockets from them are obviously not free.

Sure, you can launch supplies from Kerbin but that takes time (even when automatically repeating missions through the supply line system) and probably there will be limits on some resources or a timed spawn rate to make offworld mining desirable.

Also bring everything from Kerbin for free will be less and less attractive as you get far from it and a missed suply dtart taking months or years to arrive.

That would automatically generate a lot of missions to set-up every new colony to be self-sufficient and have a decent amount of resources in storage to build and launch your next mission.

Edit: you could also add refinement processes initially impossibile to do off-world, forcing you to mine raw resources, ship them to Kerbin and then ship back the refined product to your colonies.

I still don't like this; because all it means is that if you want to brute-force your way to space instead of cost optimizing that you can just make a mun outpost and let timewarp run for an hour or two until you get enough supplies. It also removes the ability to use contracts to subsidize exploration or establishing a relay network, and doesn't encourage efficient gameplay.

Concepts like reusable rockets are also now rendered pointless, along with refueling stations or anything else. And KSP career mode actually didn't really have a "Failure State", at least on normal. You could always take a bailout grant, and keep chugging along with the added sense of tension that this was it. That will now be completely absent, and for me will make KSP2 a straight downgrade from KSP1 if they continue to insist on this.

[Acid_Burn9]

40 minutes ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

I still don't like this; because all it means is that if you want to brute-force your way to space instead of cost optimizing that you can just make a mun outpost and let timewarp run for an hour or two until you get enough supplies. It also removes the ability to use contracts to subsidize exploration or establishing a relay network, and doesn't encourage efficient gameplay.

Concepts like reusable rockets are also now rendered pointless, along with refueling stations or anything else. And KSP career mode actually didn't really have a "Failure State", at least on normal. You could always take a bailout grant, and keep chugging along with the added sense of tension that this was it. That will now be completely absent, and for me will make KSP2 a straight downgrade from KSP1 if they continue to insist on this.

Strongly agree. Even taking into account, that cost through resources was pretty much the only reasonable way of implementing VABs in colonies, i still don't think it is a good idea to use that system for KSC on Kerbin. And of course it is still NOT a reason to scrap funds as a concept from the game, even if parts cost is already balanced by resources. It just adds too much depth to the gameplay, that i would really miss.

Edited June 25, 2020 by Acid_Burn9

[Guest]

9 minutes ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

you can just make a mun outpost and let timewarp run for an hour or two until you get enough supplies.

I doubt they implemented multiple resources to then make you find them all in one place, you'll probably need more than one outpost even presuming that you can find all resources on Mun.

14 minutes ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

It also removes the ability to use contracts to subsidize exploration

There will be mission, that's confirmed from the interview, and in my speculation I didn't introduce the idea of money still being there as a system to make off-world mining more valuable and missions/contract possible, you can then use that money to buy the resources you lack.

18 minutes ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

and doesn't encourage efficient gameplay.

On a greater scale it does, money or not as soon as you leave Kerbin it becomes inefficient to bring everything from the KSC, even with money being present when you're building a colony on Laythe they become useless if you play efficiently.

 

22 minutes ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

Concepts like reusable rockets are also now rendered pointless, along with refueling stations or anything else.

How? Maybe from Kerbin in the very early game, but the game is much, much bigger than that.

 

29 minutes ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

And KSP career mode actually didn't really have a "Failure State", at least on normal. You could always take a bailout grant

I know, I already said this some responses ago.

 

30 minutes ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

and for me will make KSP2 a straight downgrade from KSP1 if they continue to insist on this.

I don't think anyone can possibly see a downgrade in what we've seen so far.

The scope of KSP2 is simply on another scale, with a couple of mods you can add a somewhat functioning colonization system to KSP1, KSP2 from what we know is already a couple of mods away from being a fully fledged 4X game with a flight simulation side-dish, they're not going down that road only because that's not what KSP is about.

 

How would you implement money with the colony system?

How you use them when you're half the system away from Kerbin and your colony needs oxygen?

 I'm thinking about having to pay the single astronauts but given the size of those colonies I don't think this is a can of worms the devs want to open, after all this is not "City Skyline but in space, with multiple cities, life support and orbital mechanics to take into account".

 

PS I want to remember that all of this is based of speculation, we don''t know for sure if they really removed money from the game.

[Incarnation of Chaos]

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

I doubt they implemented multiple resources to then make you find them all in one place, you'll probably need more than one outpost even presuming that you can find all resources on Mun.

Follow the logic from the point of a game designer; you want your players to have to spread out to get the needed raw materials for the next stage/tier/tech level. So you either have to provide alternatives that don't require them; or put those materials within a reasonable distance/grasp of the player at the level they're expected to be at before attempting to grab them. You won't need to find them all in one place; just the ones you need to pop off the next series of rockets and colony ships.

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

On a greater scale it does, money or not as soon as you leave Kerbin it becomes inefficient to bring everything from the KSC, even with money being present when you're building a colony on Laythe they become useless if you play efficiently.

The moment you've left kerbins gravity well; you have just removed the largest source of inefficiency and waste possible. So without funds there is absolutely no reason to not just keep building bigger and bigger, and use those massive ships to setup a network of mines and layover stations between you and laythe.

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

I don't think anyone can possibly see a downgrade in what we've seen so far.

The scope of KSP2 is simply on another scale, with a couple of mods you can add a somewhat functioning colonization system to KSP1, KSP2 from what we know is already a couple of mods away from being a fully fledged 4X game with a flight simulation side-dish, they're not going down that road only because that's not what KSP is about.

That scale is WHY i'm worried that there's no money; because with it comes the potential to rapidly snowball into a state of essentially "Iv'e won, but the game won't know it for another 200 turns" very easily.

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

How? Maybe from Kerbin in the very early game, but the game is much, much bigger than that.

Why reuse anything when all the materials you could ever need are a few moments of timewarp away? Why refuel when you have a massive series of low-gravity moons ready to churn out massive ships with 10-20K DV at a moments notice?

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

How would you implement money with the colony system?

How you use them when you're half the system away from Kerbin and your colony needs oxygen?

Pretty simple; each system has it's own financial account which then is added or subtracted from/to the global account. You would have an administration center that would have policies or cards that would increase the efficiency of this, allow you to change what contracts (Or bias it towards specific ones) you'd be served etc.

Also you're not paying for oxygen; you're paying for the rocket that'll deliver the mining and IRSU equipment that'll produce it for the colony.

[Lewie]

I cannot wait for the orbital shipyards! They sound amazing, and really fun to build. Personally, I feel they could easily be abused so I am going to impose a rule on myself that I have to use isru equipment instead of just churning put new ships for every mission. I dunno.