Discussion about colony building and micromanagment

[Kapitalizing Every Word]

I made this thread to discucss about the limits of colony building but... what limits? In my opinion if colony building and management gets too complex KSP2 could be something like a factorio (or a colony sim game) but with LOADS of micromanagment since even if you can automate payload deliveries to your colonies each time you want something different you need to make another rocket launch it and all that so here is the first question. What are the things that you wouldn't want in colony building? 
In my opinion colony building will pose a new and interesting challenge that will allow us to launch rockets from other places and work on gigantic colonies  that will be great on the other hand I think resource managment has to be simple: you finde ore you keep ore. Resources should be infinite because as I said before KSP2 is not factorio. Imagine the pain that it would be if suddenly you have to move your enormous colony because you've ran out of materials for rockets. This could make it painful to play because instead of playing a space sim you just spend hours trying to move a colony. 
Also you should be able to just put simple thigs like power poles and have kerbals build them because it wouldn't be fun to move power poles with rockets and move them around (but maybe the process could be sped up with rovers to get to places and build more easily)

Edited August 25, 2021 by Kapitalizing Every Word

[shdwlrd]

It's seems like people are starting to over think what would be necessary to construct and operate a colony.

I wouldn't expect it to be as granular as DSP or Factorio as where you have to plan every aspect of your production, construction, and distribution to keep a forced high rate of production. In KSP time doesn't really matter. You can time warp until you get what you need or do something else while you wait. It's a huge environment to play around in while resources are building up.

Maintaining your colonies isn't a necessity, the devs have said you can ignore your bases and colonies without them dying out. So if you just want to build a basic colony and never expand or upgrade it, you can. It's not going to hurt anything. 

It's been claimed that you can build your colonies anyway you want. Nothing has been shown about that process, nor has it been described in any real detail so it's all speculative. We just know the  intended features and a basic idea how it should work.

There's been nothing said about resource distribution except that you can automate it. Anything said about this subject is pure speculation. Most people are expressing their ideas on how it should work and their personal wants and wishes for resources distribution. 

Intercept has said colony/base building and resource distribution will have a larger part of KSP2, but it won't over shadow the true nature of KSP, which is building, flying rockets and exploration. So I don't expect anything that is related  to stock colony and resource management to be overly complicated. 

[Pthigrivi]

I think there's a balance. I actually think there are nuggets in Factorio and other city builders that are applicable and could form the core of KSP2 colonies, but I agree that unlike those games KSP's focus is building rockets and they would want to be hugely simplified, mainly through the reduction in intermediate resource types. You don't want colonies to be so stripped down that the act of resource production is utterly rote because that will make it boring, but you also don't want it to be so complicated that you're spending more time fiddling with resources than building and flying rockets. What makes these systems fun is to have a forgiving baseline performance, but with a little bit of tuning big rewards in terms of efficiency. This to me means managing a small set of inputs and converters to maintain balance and maximize your desired outputs. For instance processing ore into uranium at exactly the rate you need to keep nuclear power going, which in turn feeds your mining operation, keeps habitation modules going, and produces enough surplus to make new rocket parts and grow your colony. Maybe given its location one colony is very efficient at producing LH, but another is better at producing metals or LS and it makes sense to ship one to the other or to a space station in between. Then automating these deliveries becomes part of the overall fine-tuning players could manipulate to do make the best use of whats available. So long as the number of middle resources is kept low I think you get a lot of bang for your buck in terms of simple rules and dynamic, diverse potential strategies. 

Edited August 25, 2021 by Pthigrivi

[Pthigrivi]

55 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

Maintaining your colonies isn't a necessity, the devs have said you can ignore your bases and colonies without them dying out. So if you just want to build a basic colony and never expand or upgrade it, you can. It's not going to hurt anything. 

While I agree you don't want a game in which players fail to set things up right and then kill a whole crew or colony when they time-warp, you also don't want colony management to be so easy that its meaningless. In fact I think reaching the upper-bound of how prosperous a colony can be should be pretty difficult, and to grow at all should require a least some clever management. Its that "easy to learn but hard to master" quality that makes games great. 

Edited August 25, 2021 by Pthigrivi

[shdwlrd]

20 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

While I agree you don't want a game in which players fail to set things up right and then kill a whole crew or colony when they time-warp, but you also don't want colony management to be so easy that its meaningless. In fact I think reaching the upper-bound of how prosperous a colony can be should be pretty difficult, and to grow at all should require a least some clever management. Its that "easy to learn but hard to master" quality that makes games great. 

I don't disagree with your vision on how colonies should operate. I have a similar vision myself. I'm just paraphrasing what was said by Nate about the operation of colonies.

[Pthigrivi]

54 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

I don't disagree with your vision on how colonies should operate. I have a similar vision myself. I'm just paraphrasing what was said by Nate about the operation of colonies.

Yeah, I guess we'll just see. I think keeping colony management a secondary system and preventing frustrating catastrophic collapses is exactly right. I guess Im playing devils advocate by saying I also hope its not so stripped down that there's nothing to it. You see it in mediocre, forgettable games all the time--lazy game mechanics where you don't have to think about what you're doing or balance anything or develop carefully and you just spam-x to win. I'd love if instead there was enough going on in terms of resource conversion that you really were adapting to different environments, and every time you played new strategies would emerge based on where you built and what you found.  War and checkers are boring. Poker and Chess are fun. Its getting to that sweet spot where you have just the right amount of complexity that a world of possibilities opens up. 

[shdwlrd]

2 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

I think keeping colony management a secondary system and preventing frustrating catastrophic collapses is exactly right. I guess Im playing devils advocate by saying I also hope its not so stripped down that there's nothing to it.

That's a very good point. I'm expecting colony management to be granular enough that if the player wants to invest in increasing the efficiency of their colony, they can. But simple enough where you can use the spam to succeed too. All that Intercept will have to do is make the spam method for advancement more difficult to nudge the player to invest in upgrading their colony. Ex. High initial build cost, some required resources are difficult to produce or must be shipped in. (That would make sense with the interstellar ship pictured above Jool having so many huge containers on it. That's all the difficult to produce resources required to found a new colony. At least that's what's my head cannon is pointing too.)

 

[Kapitalizing Every Word]

27 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

must be shipped in. (That would make sense with the interstellar ship pictured above Jool having so many huge containers on it

When resources and items are shipped they should be able to be in boxes or containers instead of the object itself like in KSP 1 thsi would mean that you can make better and more easily moveable colonies where you bring different assembly parts of the same thing in multiple missions or in a single mission without needing to use a Comically Large Fairings^tm  if you've seen some of the buildings that where shown in the KSP2 show and tell you will know that they are like really big and it could be a pain to deal with them if they have to be shipped in one pice.

[shdwlrd]

2 hours ago, Kapitalizing Every Word said:

When resources and items are shipped they should be able to be in boxes or containers instead of the object itself like in KSP 1

It seems like Intercept is moving to the direction of using containers. In the announcement trailer, there are FFT styled containers all throughout the video. But without confirmation, that is just an educated guess.

2 hours ago, Kapitalizing Every Word said:

mission without needing to use a Comically Large Fairings^tm

Awww... where's the fun in that.  Someone will try it, we all know that.

2 hours ago, Kapitalizing Every Word said:

you've seen some of the buildings that where shown in the KSP2 show and tell you will know that they are like really big and it could be a pain to deal with them if they have to be shipped in one pice.

I've seen all the demo and show n tell videos. Some of the buildings are large. (Most shown so far are about as large as a 6-10 story building. The largest building shown so far is the colonial VAB.) All but some of the smaller power generation units shown can only be built on site using either shipped in or locally collected resources.

Somewhere in one of the posts (possibly an interview question) about colonies, Nate describes the vision on how colonies will be started and how you can grow them. Most colonies are envisioned to start as small MKS/Pathfinder style of bases where you have to deliver all the components. (Whether they are in containers or as full sections, we don't know.) From there, you can grow them to the scales show in the trailer video.

 

Edited August 26, 2021 by shdwlrd

[Nirgal]

9 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

Somewhere in one of the posts (possibly an interview question) about colonies, Nate describes the vision on how colonies will be started and how you can grow them. Most colonies are envisioned to start as small MKS/Pathfinder style of bases where you have to deliver all the components. (Whether they are in containers or as full sections, we don't know.) From there, you can grow them to the scales show in the trailer video.

I remember him saying the initial colony buildings will be inflatable habitats. So we'll ship them in their entirety and pump them up on site

 

[shdwlrd]

@NirgalI don't remember Nate being specific, but I could be wrong. Most of the info for colonies was talked about a while ago.

[Nirgal]

@shdwlrd

Old interview with Nate but, as you said, we don't have much recent info:

"As for how you build a ship that supports interstellar travel, that's where another of Kerbal Space Program 2's new features comes in: Colonies. Players will be able to transport deflated portable modules to new planets—think The Martian's HAB—and deploy them on the surface, or even while in orbit."

From PC Gamer: https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/kerbal-space-program-2-interview/