Career Mode

[theJesuit]

I really dislike the contracts as well.  Especially part contracts.  But also delivering insane MP and EC storage to random base. Blech!

I too am looking forward to adventure mode in KSP2  but I have my summer break coming before then... and a lack of IRL funds to update the gaming PC for end of Feb.   So mods and ksp1 is my only hope!

[Pthigrivi]

@Streetwind Im just quoting you here cause this is the most recent career mode thread.  

“You get these "Explore" contracts for each body, like "Explore the Mun", which first has you go there and orbit (if you haven't already), then go there and land and return. Now assume that you've done that for the Mun, and you've also done that for Ike. The game knows this, and because you have both, you now unlock a new unique mission that requires you to land aseismometer in a specific location on the Mun and another in a specific location on Ike and keep them there for a few months, because the scientists ran across a weird and unexpected similarity in the way these moons might have formed, and now they need more data to confirm or reject the hypothesis. It would be a delightfully unexpected reason to do another Mun mission even when you're already going interplanetary - and one that does yield new science even in already-harvested biomes, plus an interesting little story tidbit that lets us learn more about the celestial bodies that we explore.

And how deep does that rabbithole go? Maybe if you completed the moon formation study on Mun and Ike, then something new might unlock at Jool too... or perhaps even in another star system...

This would be far more interesting to me than having a Gas Planet 2 where I'm puttin an unmanned probe into orbit, press an action group to transmit all science, and then switch back to the Space Center View to do something else.”

I love this, but the trick would be to have a branching tree of goals  so that its not overly linear or proscriptive. They have mentioned a set of more hand-crafted goals so its not crazy to imagine. If each goal opens 2 or 3 more you’d pretty quickly have a bunch of options to choose from. And while I like the game sending players to specific places rather than sending them to random locations it would be cool to use this as a means of unlocking anomaly locations. That way the discoveries wouldn’t just be non-descript patches of rocks but specifically designed vistas for study. 

Edited December 25, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[Streetwind]

Oh yeah, you could absolutely do something with anomalies. Mixing a few hand-designed locations into the procedural generation sounds great too, if potentially difficult to pull off with the PQS system. (Let's be honest, KSP1's anomalies often stuck out like a sore thumb.)

EDIT: I'd like to add, since it was left out of the quote, that I deliberately framed that idea in terms of the original KSP1 contract system, to have a common ground that everyone understands. I obviously expect KSP2 to work differently, and thus the actual implementation would likely be markedly different. It's all about giving reasons to go to celestial bodies more than just once or twice, by providing something interesting that pops up later-on.

Edited December 25, 2022 by Streetwind

[tstein]

On 11/18/2022 at 11:29 AM, Master39 said:

I'm not of a generation that needs "cheese" to play at all.

The gameplay it's either fun or it isn't, KSP1 progression is in of the second kind.

It's just gating stuff for the sake of it and then sell it back to you in exchange for mindless grind that doesn't even make sense in the context of the game (mine ore from Eve and deliver it to Minmus).

That is open to interpretation. I find the progression the fun part. Without the progression system any and all game are always boring for me. No exception,  No gating.. no evolution? no fun.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, tstein said:

That is open to interpretation. I find the progression the fun part. Without the progression system any and all game are always boring for me. No exception,  No gating.. no evolution? no fun.

Progression systems in games are fun.

KSP1 progression in particular is terribly designed. I've refunded games with better progression systems.

Luckily for me I enjoy sandbox games too, and I'm able to come up with fun progression systems for myself on the go based on headcanon and roleplay, otherwise I wouldn't be playing KSP as much as I do.

I'm not of the idea that "anything is better than nothing", mindless random generated grind is actually worse than nothing and doesn't belong anywhere outside of a Pay2Win mobile freemium game.

 

KSP not only teached an entire generation orbital mechanics, it also made them believe that management games suck.

Edited December 25, 2022 by Master39

[Pthigrivi]

On 12/25/2022 at 9:03 AM, Master39 said:

I'm not of the idea that "anything is better than nothing", mindless random generated grind is actually worse than nothing and doesn't belong anywhere outside of a Pay2Win mobile freemium game.

Oh I don’t know if it was that bad.  I mostly played career mode and it worked fine so long as you knew one thing: you can fund your whole program with the invisible World First contracts and you should only take other contracts if they dovetail into a mission you’re doing anyway. Grindy science was also a real problem, only somewhat mitigated by hotkeyes and the experiment storage unit. Breaking ground helped too. The craziest thing was that no one ever really made sense of the exploration/world first contracts so they reliably appeared up-front-and-center in Mission control. It would be like if you were playing Skyrim and none of the main or faction quests showed up in your quest journal, just the rando villager fetch quests. Bizarre.

Edited December 26, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[Drakenred65]

I think it’s that the way that a lot of contracts were generated meant that a lot of the contracts were so randomly repetitious. Seriously back to back radial decoupler on surface contract? 

[Luriss]

47 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Oh I don’t know if it was that bad.  I mostly played career mode and it worked fine so long as you knew one thing: you can fund your whole program with the invisible World First contracts and you should only take other contracts if they dovetail into a mission you’re doing anyway. Grindy science was also a real problem, only somewhat mitigated by hotkeyes and the experiment storage unit. Breaking ground helped too. The craziest thing was that no one ever really made sense of the exploration/world first contracts so they reliably appeared up-front-and-center in Mission control. It would be like if you were playing Skyrim and none of the main or faction quests showed up in your quest journal, just the rando villager fetch quests. Bizarre.

Another thing that really helped fix career mode was a mod called strategia. Through the admin building you could set focuses such as a Minmus probe program for instance, which would add bonus science and money for all the related world firsts while adding a penalty to the unrelated ones. It was really great at forcing you to actually explore new places and drive you forward.

I don't think I used a contract once in a career game with it.

 

[Pthigrivi]

2 hours ago, Luriss said:

I don't think I used a contract once in a career game with it.

Yeah I mean many of the generative contracts were okay as sidequests, kinda. Rescuing a kerbal or putting a satellite in a specific orbit were fine if you were already going there. What didn’t make sense was the impression players were given, that the list of 4 or 7 contracts were the only thing you could do to make money and develop. That made the game appear much more restrictive than it actually was. 

[tstein]

8 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Yeah I mean many of the generative contracts were okay as sidequests, kinda. Rescuing a kerbal or putting a satellite in a specific orbit were fine if you were already going there. What didn’t make sense was the impression players were given, that the list of 4 or 7 contracts were the only thing you could do to make money and develop. That made the game appear much more restrictive than it actually was. 

Well that is a general problem with KSP, not  career mode. KPS was bad at communication with the user.  A simple always present list of examples that could be done in game would have already helped a lot.

 

With career I kind of likes the concept of  funds. Why? Because that  gave me a  reason to not  simply make the largest and mostly absurd rocket just to put a small satellite in orbit.

 

[Jarin]

I mostly just used contracts as a source of recruits from the endless stranded kerbals (seriously, who's leaving them all up there?). The only other thing I did was when I was bored, challenging myself to see how many contracts I could complete with a single launch.

[Drakenred65]

The way I see it with contracts was that

 

1) part contracts could have been done a different way, for example completing one gives you that part, permanently, the problem was that science was so borked that often by the time you actually did the contract you probably already researched it, or could have.

Also part contracts could have been “smarter” like a weird pair I had, test wheel while landed and test radial separator while landed ? Ok run test on wheel, then fire separators then hit launch and wheel goes flying, 2 contracts that payed for that launch.

 

2 collect “science” . The ground ones turned up long before I got rover parts, or even jet parts to make a jet powered ground pod, I was able to build a science roller using empty starter fuel tanks but oh so annoying.

 

also, building a jet that can get over 17,000 when you only have rocket parts or the baby Why is it even showing up?

 

4 hours ago, Jarin said:

I mostly just used contracts as a source of recruits from the endless stranded kerbals (seriously, who's leaving them all up there?). 

Changing the subject…..

 

well I’m not as bad about stranding Kerbals in deep space as I was.

oh ahem.

4 hours ago, Jarin said:

 

 

 

[Skorj]

The best fix for career mode, the one I use all the time, is just to set the penalty for refusing a contract to 0.  There are fun contract missions, though many of them are tutorials such as rendezvous and docking.  I do like building a tow truck to rescue stranded capsules and bring them back to Kerbin safely.  Taking tourists to the Mun is fun when you're still learning.  Mostly there's stuff you're doing anyway, exploring planets, but its nice to be challenged with the missions to visit 5 arbitrary planets/moons.

 

[tstein]

On 11/27/2022 at 2:55 PM, regex said:

The system in KSP1 should be shelved, end of story. It's nothing but bad gameplay. Contracts should be offered on request based on where the player wants to go and should be user-filterable; I am never going to do those dumb part testing contracts or put yet another useless satellite into a weird orbit for no reason. The system should generate a ton of contracts too so I don't have to reject them, or allow me to blanket reject them. The career system has some decent constraints but tieing it to that silly contract system killed it.

Alternatively, if the system from KSP1 is preferred, engineer it in such a way that I never have to take a contract. I'm here to fly spaceships and do cool spaceship things within a progression system that is fun and allows me to set my own goals, not test parts under dumb procedural constraints that make zero sense.

Again,  a lot of people  disagree on the tests. The tests themselves msut be improved, because  several make no sense, but they were there to add another activity.

 

Tests of parts are a good idea, they we just  badly implemented (why why in hell I need to test a mamooth in sub orbital trajectory in Gimly? )

11 hours ago, Skorj said:

The best fix for career mode, the one I use all the time, is just to set the penalty for refusing a contract to 0.  There are fun contract missions, though many of them are tutorials such as rendezvous and docking.  I do like building a tow truck to rescue stranded capsules and bring them back to Kerbin safely.  Taking tourists to the Mun is fun when you're still learning.  Mostly there's stuff you're doing anyway, exploring planets, but its nice to be challenged with the missions to visit 5 arbitrary planets/moons.

 

The funny part is. Most players after a while  dominated the game, and they continued playign only because they  try to complete challenges, like go  to duna and back in 1 fuel tank.   That proves that contracts CAN be great. You just need to  improve the system! After a certain point they become challenges. They need to be de stupidified although.

[regex]

4 hours ago, tstein said:

Again,  a lot of people  disagree on the tests. The tests themselves msut be improved, because  several make no sense, but they were there to add another activity.

I don't particularly care whether people disagree on the tests, that's tangential to the thrust of my comment (although tests are pretty stupid to begin with).

[tstein]

Just now, regex said:

I don't particularly care whether people disagree on the tests, that's tangential to the thrust of my comment (although tests are pretty stupid to begin with).

How can they be stupid if most of a space program is testing things? Nothing can be more kerbal and  more experimental than testing.

[Guest]

4 hours ago, tstein said:

because  several make no sense

None of them makes any sense.

And that's is a mayor flaw of the whole system.

It felt like they wanted to make something smart but they didn't have the time or the resource to implement it.

If you replaced all test parts with "black boxes" of different sizes ("1.25 m. Technology testing bay") with unspecified test articles inside (or maybe different generic models based on the test environment) the part test contracts would have made a lot more sense.

Or, with a bit more effort, test contracts with manually written conditions being a step of the part unlock procedure, or an alternative to part unlocking with science.

Multiply that for every contract type, mining? Make ore useful and I'll mine it, Station and bases? Make them actually work or useful in some other way. Satellites? Same.

The whole system just feels like a pre-alpha placeholder for a ton of other things that were never added.

Whenever it asks me to test a parachute on the Mun or to lift ore from Eve to whatever destination it throws me out of the suspension of disbelief and reminds me of the dozens of mods that are needed for the progression to make sense.

And all of that it's before we even talk about the gameplay balance and how fun it is.

[tstein]

Just now, Master39 said:

None of them makes any sense.

And that's is a mayor flaw of the whole system.

It felt like they wanted to make something smart but they didn't have the time or the resource to implement it.

If you replaced all test parts with "black boxes" of different sizes ("1.25 m. Technology testing bay") with unspecified test articles inside (or maybe different generic models based on the test environment) the part test contracts would have made a lot more sense.

Or, with a bit more effort, test contracts with manually written conditions being a step of the part unlock procedure, or an alternative to part unlocking with science.

Multiply that for every contract type, mining? Make ore useful and I'll mine it, Station and bases? Make them actually work or useful in some other way. Satellites? Same.

The whole system just feels like a pre-alpha placeholder for a ton of other things that were never added.

Whenever it asks me to test a parachute on the Mun or to lift ore from Eve to whatever destination it throws me out of the suspension of disbelief and reminds me of the dozens of mods that are needed for the progression to make sense.

And all of that it's before we even talk about the gameplay balance and how fun it is.

That! The concept of testing is not a problem. The problem is that the tests we got are simply 1 click   and a click on a very dumb condition. Tests should be  transformed into challenges,  (that is the reason the contracts peopel liked the most are the rescue ones). and There should be explicit  effort to not make insane ones.

[regex]

4 minutes ago, tstein said:

How can they be stupid if most of a space program is testing things? Nothing can be more kerbal and  more experimental than testing.

You test things in a lab and controlled conditions, not in-flight under ridiculous constraints. And quite frankly I never cared about how "kerbal" something was, that's a useless metric IMO.

[Drakenred65]

The problem is that many experiments that do get done just seem, odd, and trying to represent them in KSP 1 is, difficult, at best.

for example some of the spider web experiments ( spiders in zero g, how do they build and maintain webs, are they able to build ones that can trap prey, is there differences  in behavior? 
 

ants, how do they respond to being in Zero g. Does being in a more confined environment help or hinder them, same for a less confined environment. 
 

colors, does being in microgravity impact eyesight and the perception of color, how do paints/pigments react over time when exposed to radiation and micro meteorites. 

 

And thats not counting things like the almost lost LDEF 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Duration_Exposure_Facility

 

if your on the outside a lot of those tests look silly, or to congressmen pointlessly wasteful , 

 

 

Edited December 31, 2022 by Drakenred65

[tstein]

We could have far better "tests" Example.

1-" We decided that we want to discover how much we can push  our structure parts, we want you  to extend our current record for longest ship in moon orbit (currently 5 meters) by 6 meters! The craft must weight at least 20 tons and must be  built before launch.

2-"We decided to conduct research of the core of Minimus. For that we need you to plant these explosive devices in the 4 different marked spots and trough a relay network detonate them simultaneously.  Before I forget,  you must have a sismic sensor landed  when that happens."

3-We want to test our new ablative materials technologies. For that we  want you to land a ship in kerbin. The rick is, if must  reach 200 km altitude and you cannot use any means of propulsion  under 180 km  after you have reached the 200 km mark.

4-"We want you to break the universe record for  running to the mun and back.  You need to  complete a mun fly by and return to kerbin in  7 hours!

 

[Pthigrivi]

I personally wouldn’t be sad if they scrapped all contracts except the progression contracts, adding some in for things like establishing colonies, discovering anomalies and new resources, etc. Just let the fundamental rules of the game drive new vessel types and missions. Don’t have the game tell players to make a relay satellite, just include line of sight and signal transmission and let them build it so they can transmit from the far side of the Mun. Don’t have a contract telling players “haul x uranium from Gilly to Eve”, just make it so Gilly has lots of Uranium and Eve has little or none and let the player figure out how to keep reactors going where they need them. Unless they are hugely open ended like “Plant a flag on Duna” artificial contracts will always seem arbitrary and nonsensical, and will always distract from players doing things that actually make sense within the structure of the game. If science and resource gathering had better dynamics you wouldn’t need contracts at all. 

Edited December 31, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[Drakenred65]

10 hours ago, tstein said:

We could have far better "tests" Example.

1-" We decided that we want to discover how much we can push  our structure parts, we want you  to extend our current record for longest ship in moon orbit (currently 5 meters) by 6 meters! The craft must weight at least 20 tons and must be  built before launch.

I thought you typed lunch, not launch

[Pthigrivi]

4 hours ago, Drakenred65 said:

I thought you typed lunch, not launch

[Drakenred65]

Nah, I have a weird thing of miss reading things from time to time.