The "Unpaid Research Program" strategy decreases reputation instead of just decreasing reputation gains, as described.

[Akilax]

Hello everyone,

I encountered a problem when using the "Unpaid Research Program". When I set this strategy up (in my case at 80%) in the administration building and then successfully complete contracts, I always lose reputation. This should not happen according to the description of the strategy. No other missions were failed, declined or expired during these periods. Neither did any Kerbal die or any other event occur.

Precise Description:

When I set up the "Unpaid Research Program" strategy at 80% and then accept a contract that originally would have yielded 10 reputation, 0 science and 1000 funds, the contract will show that I will receive 2 reputation, 3.7 science and 1000 funds. This would be correct.

Once I complete the contract, I will instead lose reputation (this should never happen from this strategy), while gaining the correct amount of science and the amount of funds remaining unchanged.

Conclusion:

KSP does not implement the "Unpaid Research Program" correctly as described in the administration building.

Example (explanation below each image):

In this image we see the state of the game before a contract. The current reputation value is shown in the red warning message as 392, science is 1125.7 and funds are at 432998. We also see that only the "Unpaid Research Program" strategy is currently active and that it was set to 80%.

In this image we see the completion notification with the correctly modified rewards according to the active strategy.

In this image we can see that reputation has dropped to 391 (-1) and that science increased to 1127.1 (+1.4).

Question:

Is this behaviour indeed faulty, as I suspect, or am I not understanding something that is going on here?

Thank you for your time and effort in addressing my problem.

[jimmymcgoochie]

Reputation is weird, in that it has a very large dose of diminishing returns. To see this in action, bring up the cheat menu and add 100 reputation- your overall reputation won't go up by 100 unless you're at 0 or below. Now add another 100 and it'll go up by even less, and so on. But if you remove 100 reputation, you'll see that it goes down much faster and at high reputation levels it'll take an awful lot of +100s to cancel out one -100.

What you're seeing with these contracts might just be the way the modifiers are being applied: if you're gaining 2 reputation but then the strategy removes 80% of that, I suspect that the game first credits you with 2 reputation and then removes 1.6; it's just that due to the diminishing returns, the +2 added a lot less than 2 but the 1.6 wasn't subject to diminishing returns and so got removed right away, producing the net loss of 1 (and possibly an invisible decimal that you'd only see in the save file or cheat menu) reputation. For funds and science there's no issue since those two are linear, but reputation is the odd one out and so it behaves a bit strangely.

My advice is, don't use that strategy at all. While reputation isn't all that useful, you still need some to get the 2 and 3 star contracts to show up and frittering it away to get tiny science gains isn't worth it.

 

(P.S. this is just my hypothesis, I don't actually know if this is how these strategies work- so unless someone shows up with actual implementation knowledge to confirm, don't quote me on it!)

Edited February 7, 2022 by jimmymcgoochie

[Charley]

On 2/8/2022 at 12:58 AM, jimmymcgoochie said:

Reputation is weird, in that it has a very large dose of diminishing returns. To see this in action, bring up the cheat menu and add 100 reputation- your overall reputation won't go up by 100 unless you're at 0 or below. Now add another 100 and it'll go up by even less, and so on. But if you remove 100 reputation, you'll see that it goes down much faster and at high reputation levels it'll take an awful lot of +100s to cancel out one -100.

What you're seeing with these contracts might just be the way the modifiers are being applied: if you're gaining 2 reputation but then the strategy removes 80% of that, I suspect that the game first credits you with 2 reputation and then removes 1.6; it's just that due to the diminishing returns, the +2 added a lot less than 2 but the 1.6 wasn't subject to diminishing returns and so got removed right away, producing the net loss of 1 (and possibly an invisible decimal that you'd only see in the save file or cheat menu) reputation. For funds and science there's no issue since those two are linear, but reputation is the odd one out and so it behaves a bit strangely.

My advice is, don't use that strategy at all. While reputation isn't all that useful, you still need some to get the 2 and 3 star contracts to show up and frittering it away to get tiny science gains isn't worth it.

 

(P.S. this is just my hypothesis, I don't actually know if this is how these strategies work- so unless someone shows up with actual implementation knowledge to confirm, don't quote me on it!) After all, there is a risk that in my theory I may be wrong and the use of research can still lead to an excellent result, and my experience was erroneous. I felt something similar when I wrote personal ethical dilemma essay examples for https://papersowl.com/examples/ethical-dilemma/ It's very hard to give repurposed bovine waste advice. On the ethical side, I understand that many people can pass them on to each other, and if I make a mistake, then others will make it, and I would not want the result to be like that.

Thanks for the advice! I also could not understand how to properly use the research strategy. I thought that I was making some kind of mistake, now I understand that this is not effective.

Edited January 19, 2023 by Charley