Are resources a better fit than money for KSP2?

[Pthigrivi]

We've talked about this before but some time has gone by and very likely we've got some time to kill before a full progression mode takes shape. I'm firmly of the opinion that the decision to focus on resources as the prime commodity for producing fuel and parts is the right one for a small host of reasons. I'll keep it short and we can dig in to each topic. 

1) Career mode and funds never really worked well in KSP1. Between the generative contracts, unmanageable scaling and pacing, and the bolted-on nature of the system Career mode never really became a smoothly integrated part of the game.

2) KSP2 has a much wider proposed scope. KSP1 never offered the ability to build vessels offworld so everything needed to be built and sent from Kerbin. As soon as you have colonies and offworld VABs you've wildly changed the structure of the game in ways that make resources utterly critical to development and money less and less useful over the course of the game.

3) Having a central abstract currency that's needed to buy parts creates potential failure states wherein you've sent out vessels hoping for a return but they fail for whatever reason, potentially leaving you without the cash to continue your program and forcing a restart. 

There are others but I'll start with those. What do you think?

Edited July 23, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[moeggz]

Agreed. ResourceS (plural) was a big selling point for me. Having to scope out planetary bodies, choose base locations based on what resources you need then spending those resources to go further to build new bases to get more resources and on and on seems like a way more engaging gameplay loop than “test this parachute at 50k meters” and “slap all science parts on a spacecraft and hop around the moon for 6 hours to finish the tech tree”

I like sandbox games but not in creative mode. Like survival in Minecraft. I want to build interesting things and go to new places but I don’t want any quest markers. And if it’s just fully the creative mode I always spend less time in it as part of the fun of the creative process (to me) is working within restraints. Let me as the player learn where the resources are and my desire to keep building will send me on mining expeditions to build cooler things that can mine cooler things and so on. 

[RocketRockington]

1. Premising that currency is a bad idea based on admitting that it was used poorly in KSP1 (by your own estimates) just invalidates this argument right from the start.  That's a question of design and implementation quality, rather than the mechanic.

2. I'd suggest laying off the superlatives.  " Utterly critical".  Pfft.  Makes it hard to take your arguments seriously.

That said, resources are only one mechanic to better translate work done at a colony into manufactured product, if you disregard it as a way of compensating workers for their time.  Resources have the down side that you turn the game into a mining expedition, which seems unrealistic to the real challenges of space.  It's also makes the game feel stupid in the sense of either using fake resources - eg tiberium- or positing that kerbin is missing a lot of basic elements of the periodic table.  Both of these strike me as not fitting a space sim with any shred of realism.

Instead, I think it would be more fitting to have complex fuel  and provisioning chains - which yes, do use resources, but not for construction, which should remain in Kerbin, pre-interstellar. Ways to slowly move toward larger populations that are less dependent on shipping things from Kerbin.  Large colonies that exist for research and development purposes.  

After interstellar, space based manufacturing seems most interesting - asteroid processing, etc.  It both leverages the rocket game better than ground colonies, and is more realistic.  At this point, a basic resource system is good, though I still wouldn't go down the route of breadcrumbing tech availability by further adding more levels of unobtanium scattered through star systems.

Progression gating should be done by R&D progress, not by the absurd idea that you can't find nickel or uranium on Kerbin, and that these resources are distributed in a gamified fashion throughout the galaxy

3. Nothing about resources  instead of money solves your listed failure case inherently, so it's argument that isn't for or against cash or resources.  Only by allowing infinite resources.on Kerbin is your case solved - and that creates far more issues than a corner case that virtually never comes up in KSP1.  Namely that there's no challenge in the Kerbol system that can't be solved by just strapping on most boosters, ala sandbox, and it makes the game seem trivial till you get to unobtanium based rockets, which makes the game further trivialized.

It's hilarious that your point #1 was that KSP1 has too much money, and point #3 was a concern over running out.

Anyway, overall a resource system doesn't seem bad in principle, but the implementation details we've had vague indications of from. IG fill me with nothing but dread that they're making it more gamified and silly than a currency system.  I'd rather have had good designers revamp the money system vs that.

[Periple]

Resources are a great deal more interesting than money in my opinion as they're non-fungible, which means you can hang all kinds of mechanics and constraints on them to create interesting design, logistical, and optimization problems. Moreover, once you get into the colonial phase of the game, money kind of loses its meaning -- you'll be fully in control of all production in every colony, so where would any resources you could buy with funds even come from? If you start on that path pretty soon you're looking at simulating an entire colonial economy and that would get pretty far from the game's core gameplay pillars. 

That said, I think money could work well in the early game. In the Kerbin-based part of the game we kind of assume by default that there's a kerbal society with a kerbal economy around the KSC, so money-based constraints make intuitive sense. It'd be a bit odd – at least initially – if KSC started out with a power plant, fuel refinery, mine, and whatever other primary resource production things you'd need to build your first rocket!

Edited July 23, 2023 by Periple

[KSK]

Agree with 1),

Disagree with 2) because, in the words of the Homer Simpson ‘money can be exchanged for goods and services’. In other words, I can’t see any reason why resources couldn’t be abstracted away in favour of money.  Parts could be more, or less expensive depending where they’re  manufactured and the infrastructure available  at the manufacturing site, for example.

At the very least, I would argue that money and resources together would be a better fit, than either of them separately.

As for 3), I’m not averse to fail states. For tycoon or management style games, there almost has to be a hard fail state where you lose the game because of bad management, otherwise what’s the point? For other game types, e.g. factory, or grand strategy games, it’s usually possible to hit a ‘soft’ fail state where it’s technically possible to play your way out of the hole you’ve dug yourself into but it’s easier to start a new game and do things better that time around.

The devil’s very much in the details with this one but personally, I don’t see ‘because it might lead to failure states’ as a reason in itself, to get rid of money.

 

 

[Chemp]

5 hours ago, KSK said:

Agree with 1),

Disagree with 2) because, in the words of the Homer Simpson ‘money can be exchanged for goods and services’. In other words, I can’t see any reason why resources couldn’t be abstracted away in favour of money.  Parts could be more, or less expensive depending where they’re  manufactured and the infrastructure available  at the manufacturing site, for example.

At the very least, I would argue that money and resources together would be a better fit, than either of them separately.

As for 3), I’m not averse to fail states. For tycoon or management style games, there almost has to be a hard fail state where you lose the game because of bad management, otherwise what’s the point? For other game types, e.g. factory, or grand strategy games, it’s usually possible to hit a ‘soft’ fail state where it’s technically possible to play your way out of the hole you’ve dug yourself into but it’s easier to start a new game and do things better that time around.

The devil’s very much in the details with this one but personally, I don’t see ‘because it might lead to failure states’ as a reason in itself, to get rid of money.

 

 

I agree that money could be used as an abstract substitute for different kinds of resources. However, I think the added complexity of having to deal with them will give the game even more replay value, at least for me.

In principle, I also agree that having both, money and resources, would be a good fit. That said, as soon as we get into the colonization aspect, I see many situations, where money would seem out of place. Let's say you established a settlement on a new planet. It has a population of a few Kerbals or is even totally automated. If you want it to grow (and don't want to fly in new parts from Kerbin), the idea of Bob paying Bill to manufacture new parts collides with how I see Kerbals: Intrepid explorers, not greedy capitalists. But that's just my headcanon.

11 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

3) Having a central abstract currency that's needed to buy parts creates potential failure states wherein you've sent out vessels hoping for a return but they fail for whatever reason, potentially leaving you without the cash to continue your program and forcing a restart. 

Emphasis added

That could happen with resources, too. Nobody said that managing a space program is easy .

[LunarMetis]

I think a resource system would be a great addition to KSP2, since I'd feel like it would make planetary exploration more interesting, and gives the player something more to look for. I don't think the game should explicitly say exactly which celestial bodies are rich in what resource, but if the game is like "Hey, if you want to build this really advanced tech, try getting ahold of this resource, and go figure out where it is," that would make it a fun mid-/end-game mechanic in my opinion.

However, I'm not too sure how it would work for early-game, since you won't have any colonies or production facilities established yet on any celestial body. I'm not sure how I'd feel about having production plants in the KSC, and if resources would even need to be sought out on Kerbin. If there ought to be some balanced gameplay with a resource system, then keeping funds as the constraint for rocket-building for early game would be fine. At a certain point where you have unlocked the technology to get to most places in the Kerbolar System, funds should then swap over to resources as the primary constraint on rocket-building, and then colony-building / deep-space exploration becomes necessary to unlock more advanced technology after that point. I don't think funds should be gone entirely, but reworked to accommodate the resource system.

As is tradition with IG, most details on how the resource system will work / how it would be balanced are fuzzy at best. Hopefully they might do something like this by the time resource management is added into the game, but I think most things revolving around development should be taken by licking a giant salt lamp or something. I'm also spit-balling ideas here, so let me know what you think.

Edited July 23, 2023 by LunarMetis

[GGG-GoodGuyGreg]

I, for one, will know when I get to see this feature implemented.  And I don't mean to be pessimistic, it's just that even a seemingly bad concept can work if it's well integrated with the rest of the game mechanics and it "clicks" into place.

[JadeOfMaar]

Consider this: You have a resource that represents either the bulk of your construction material or electronics and components that are hard to produce but highly demanded. In the early and mid-game it's passively produced on Kerbin and you can acquire it easily (from a cache that periodically refills) by spending funds, but once you're far (but not too far) from Kerbin you must dedicate a portion of your factories to producing this (or each) resource. You're welcome to both options of waiting for your supply to build locally and to order a shipment in from Kerbin in such case as you're preparing to build a huge ship but it's more practical to have that surplus shipment come in than to do without and wait longer. While you still depend on shipments from Kerbin it's also viable to mine something super-valuable and send it back to Kerbin to pay off the construction resource shipment. Perhaps you will hit milestones and meet quotas for sending back target amounts of each of several rare resources, and a given resource's value drops because you're overdoing it and flooding the market in a given time period. Of course, once you're far enough from Kerbin money loses all value.

In a socioeconomic system where capitalism can no longer apply, every individual needs to have and to exercise some skill that keeps everyone alive and keeps QoL high... This may be out of scope but how then (if at all), would one approach adding replay value to what is a "closed loop" city builder side-game with no stock life support, no part failure and no kerbal death (by old age)?

[AngryBaer]

17 hours ago, Periple said:

It'd be a bit odd – at least initially – if KSC started out with a power plant, fuel refinery, mine, and whatever other primary resource production things you'd need to build your first rocket!

May be odd but I'd love this approach. I've always found there is much too little to do on Kerbin itself. I'd go even further and say you need to discover and transport resources on Kerbin far away from the KSC to enable some of your tech. It would encourage using some heavy lifter aircraft. E.g. finding a Uranium deposit for the nuclear engines, etc. The whole "just strap on more rockets" approach would be solved by fuel and building material being limited, rather than money. It would also make the "Transport this ore from A to B" missions much more meaningful.

Edited July 24, 2023 by AngryBaer

[VlonaldKerman]

I think that the resource model is a good one, for the following reason:

The game is about conducting science and living on other planets. In the real world, launching to orbit is unbelievably expensive, even with reusability. Thus, any substantial semi-permanent colony would use ISRU anyway. This is true by definition- the cost to launch to orbit, even with substantial reusability, is simply prohibitive. Thus, if a colony exists, it must not get its resources from Earth. If the game were to have funds as a mechanic, and if the funds system was at all realistic, it wouldn’t alter gameplay substantially. It would add some tedious steps in the beginning of a career as you fund your main missions, but once you reach the point of semi-permanent extra-kerbin habitation, you would use ISRU anyway. To the extent that funds would alter your gameplay at this stage, it would only be a nuisance.

I actually like the risk of a fail-state- I like being forced to plan extensively, test craft, build in redundancy, etc. However, I don’t think funds are the best way to do this. I prefer various gameplay/difficulty mods that add more risk to actual missions, and I can decide the fail-state on my own (I.e. if 10 kerbals die, career over, etc.). Besides, I’m sure someone will add a money mod. That’s not an excuse for bad gameplay, but I think it’s reasonable to leave niche preferences to modders.

TLDR: funds are bad b/c they wouldn’t substantially alter player behavior in the mid-late game, and would thus be at best redundant, and at worst, tedious.

[Pthigrivi]

20 hours ago, KSK said:

As for 3), I’m not averse to fail states. For tycoon or management style games, there almost has to be a hard fail state where you lose the game because of bad management, otherwise what’s the point? For other game types, e.g. factory, or grand strategy games, it’s usually possible to hit a ‘soft’ fail state where it’s technically possible to play your way out of the hole you’ve dug yourself into but it’s easier to start a new game and do things better that time around.

I actually agree with this. If there were no other issues this would not be a dealbreaker by itself. It's just a check in the 'con' column.
 

23 hours ago, RocketRockington said:

Instead, I think it would be more fitting to have complex fuel  and provisioning chains - which yes, do use resources, but not for construction, which should remain in Kerbin, pre-interstellar. Ways to slowly move toward larger populations that are less dependent on shipping things from Kerbin.  Large colonies that exist for research and development purposes.  

I'd be pretty surprised if humans don't set up self-sufficient colonies on the moon, mars, and probably jupiter and saturn's moons looong before we even consider colonizing other star systems. In my mind you've got to walk before you run, and you've got run before you traverse interstellar space. 
 

23 hours ago, RocketRockington said:

It's hilarious that your point #1 was that KSP1 has too much money, and point #3 was a concern over running out.

Anyway, overall a resource system doesn't seem bad in principle, but the implementation details we've had vague indications of from. IG fill me with nothing but dread that they're making it more gamified and silly than a currency system.  I'd rather have had good designers revamp the money system vs that.

 

20 hours ago, KSK said:

Disagree with 2) because, in the words of the Homer Simpson ‘money can be exchanged for goods and services’. In other words, I can’t see any reason why resources couldn’t be abstracted away in favour of money.  Parts could be more, or less expensive depending where they’re  manufactured and the infrastructure available  at the manufacturing site, for example.

At the very least, I would argue that money and resources together would be a better fit, than either of them separately.

I'm going to take these at once because they're getting to the heart of the problem. Out of the gate: Kerbal Space Program 1 is a fun simulator, but it's not a very good game. Games, especially good ones, have certain characteristics: understandable and compelling mechanics, a fundamentally sound and complete gameplay loop, and when they're especially good they provide relatively efficient and tight game balance across as broad a range of creatively driven  solutions as possible. With KSP2's scope there are challenges to the first two points but I'd like to focus on the third. 

Part of the reason KSP1's funds + reputation based contract model never really worked well is because funds as a resource fails in two ways:

1) Funds are extraordinarily difficult to scale to a wide range of playstyles. Some players like to play one mission at a time all the way through one after another. Other players like to spread out several or dozens of missions simultaneously and juggle between them. What we're looking for is a resource system (including money or not) that is able to scale to both approaches. Having a single, universally fungible and transmittable resource like money actually makes this much harder. When you're designing a resource you've got two main potential pitfalls: either the resource is so scarce that players must grind to acquire it, or its too abundant in which case it rapidly ceases to be a meaningful constraint. In an open world game like KSP this poses a problem for a resource like funds or money, because some players will prefer to do lots of missions around Kerbin first and others will set out and travel all the way to Jool, and there's no sensible way to scale the rewards between different player approaches. You're inevitably going to leave some players frustrated because there's not enough and other players underwhelmed because there's too much. Wherever you set the reward dial for local and distant rewards you've in-effect hard-coded a preferential gameplay style.

Having multiple, locally gathered resources doesn't fall into this trap because resources can be scaled to their local environment and the 'next hop' rather than needing to be scaled across the scope of gameplay. If methalox is abundant locally and uranium or He3 is not you might change the way you play, or choose to set up a supply route to combine a lucrative groove of materials at an opportune hub. You're not just looking to MAX MONEY, you're looking at the actual local situation and what its opportunities are. More fundamentally the thing you're harvesting isn't able to be magically transported from planet to planet. The very act of detecting it, gathering it, and transporting it is an integral part of KSP as a space traversal game. Money doesn't behave the way physical materials do. It's fundamentally non-physical, and so plays at best an oblique role in a game about physics. 

2) There's no sensible limit or constraint on the storage of money. Why is this a problem?  Players don't usually worry about having too much of something*, but game designers do. Again, if a resource becomes rapidly overabundant it ceases to have meaning in the game. If I have 8 zillion funds I can build whatever I want as big as I want wherever I want and I'm no longer thinking about efficiency or locality at all. Again you've run into the scaling problem where some gameplay styles will rapidly reward players and max out the central currency and other gameplay styles will be relatively inefficient. The way to solve this is to make materials local and physical. You're not just heaping up mountains of cash, you need to devote resources to storage and transportation. Players aren't just going to store oceans of methalox in mountains of tanks. They're going to produce what they need most and then proceed on to the next thing they need most. If you can keep players hopskotching from one resource to the next and each base to the next then as they say you’ve got a pot of stew going. 

* Ideally, especially in a game that's about exploring space and efficient resource utilization players should care about having too much of something. If you have too much of something its because you didn't adequately invest in gathering and processing something else. Building an efficient, self-sustaining colony should be less like cornering  or glutting a niche market and more like carefully balancing a few or several resources to maintain equilibrium and, if done well, produce a viable export. This is both more like the real wold and more engaging as gameplay. 

Edited July 24, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[Book]

13 hours ago, LunarMetis said:

However, I'm not too sure how it would work for early-game, since you won't have any colonies or production facilities established yet on any celestial body. I'm not sure how I'd feel about having production plants in the KSC, and if resources would even need to be sought out on Kerbin.

 

On 7/23/2023 at 12:43 AM, RocketRockington said:

It's also makes the game feel stupid in the sense of either using fake resources - eg tiberium- or positing that kerbin is missing a lot of basic elements of the periodic table

If I recall correctly, there's no resources shortage on Kerbin, you have everything you need to build rockets from the get go, which is intended to help the early game be easier at the start. Resources kick in when you want to build stuff off planet, where you obviously don't have access to Kerbin's resources and manufacturing.  

I do not know how it will all fit together though, will you be able to use Kerbin as a stash of infinite resources that you just need to transport around, or if there will be more constraints making you have to have space mines to build your Deadaluses engines and other orbital constructions?
My guess from the dev team philosophy is try to aim for something balanced where both options are on the table and players can adapt to their play style with interesting problems. (at least that's the goal)

[RocketRockington]

4 hours ago, Book said:

If I recall correctly, there's no resources shortage on Kerbin, you have everything you need to build rockets from the get go, which is intended to help the early game be easier at the start. Resources kick in when you want to build stuff off planet, where you obviously don't have access to Kerbin's resources and manufacturing.

I don't remember where, but I recall the devs saying in some interview that more advanced engines will be hated behind resources you can't find on Kerbin.  Maybe I'm misremembering, but that's what I was basing this comment on.  This is ridiculous if that's going to be the case.

  There's one reasonable case for this - harvesting antimatter from a gas giant's magnetic field is posited in some hard sci fi.  But I'm pretty sure they mean to have multiple levels of this sort of stupid, to force you to explore other planets not because of reasonable, scientific inquiry or whatever, but because you need tiberium to build the SuperSwerv Mk5 so you can find the alien ruins and the precursor home planet or w/e.

So hackneyed, derivative, gamey and idiotic, but that's what I believe KSP2s 'adventure' mode is going to consist of.

Edited July 24, 2023 by RocketRockington

[LunarMetis]

10 hours ago, Book said:

If I recall correctly, there's no resources shortage on Kerbin, you have everything you need to build rockets from the get go, which is intended to help the early game be easier at the start. Resources kick in when you want to build stuff off planet, where you obviously don't have access to Kerbin's resources and manufacturing.  

I do not know how it will all fit together though, will you be able to use Kerbin as a stash of infinite resources that you just need to transport around, or if there will be more constraints making you have to have space mines to build your Deadaluses engines and other orbital constructions?
My guess from the dev team philosophy is try to aim for something balanced where both options are on the table and players can adapt to their play style with interesting problems. (at least that's the goal)

Right, that's what I'm wondering, because if Kerbin is going to be this infinite sink of resources that the player will pull from, it'll remove constraint from rocket-building because since you'll have infinite resources anyway, you can build a mega-rocket right from the get-go and not worry about a single thing. It would completely ruin any sense of progression. That's why I think funds should probably stay in the game as a primary early-game constraint, along with unlocked tech from science points.

Again, nothing is known about how exactly this is gonna play out. Maybe the devs will come up with a better solution to tackle this problem. 

5 hours ago, RocketRockington said:

to force you to explore other planets not because of reasonable, scientific inquiry or whatever, but because you need tiberium to build the SuperSwerv Mk5 so you can find the alien ruins and the precursor home planet or w/e.

I hope that's not the direction they'll take. I think scouting for resources should be one reason to explore other worlds, but I'd rather not do it as part of an active effort to follow a storyline.

[cocoscacao]

7 hours ago, RocketRockington said:

But I'm pretty sure they mean to have multiple levels of this sort of stupid, to force you to explore other planets not because of reasonable, scientific inquiry or whatever, but because you need tiberium to build the SuperSwerv Mk5

That's a hell of a lot better reason why you can't built SuperSwerv Mk5, than anything in Ksp 1. As for element realism... We launch from Kerbin, not Earth. Game must be gamey. Scientific inquiry also must have some meaningful end goal, not just random points assigned to it.

I believe a compromise can be made. In the beginning, reliance on money is crucial. After that, you use sci advancement to research and sell patent rights on Kerbin, which brings you more than enough money to focus on gathering resources for further travel. Imagine if some space company held patent rights for microwaves, mobile phones etc...

Implementing and balancing these stuff in games can be really hard though... I am curious how things will work.

Edited July 24, 2023 by cocoscacao

[VlonaldKerman]

7 hours ago, RocketRockington said:

I don't remember where, but I recall the devs saying in some interview that more advanced engines will be hated behind resources you can't find on Kerbin.  Maybe I'm misremembering, but that's what I was basing this comment on.  This is ridiculous if that's going to be the case.

  There's one reasonable case for this - harvesting antimatter from a gas giant's magnetic field is posited in some hard sci fi.  But I'm pretty sure they mean to have multiple levels of this sort of stupid, to force you to explore other planets not because of reasonable, scientific inquiry or whatever, but because you need tiberium to build the SuperSwerv Mk5 so you can find the alien ruins and the precursor home planet or w/e.

So hackneyed, derivative, gamey and idiotic, but that's what I believe KSP2s 'adventure' mode is going to consist of.

I think the best way to approach this is the way KSP 1 mods tend to work- there are a few resources which are rare and require you to go to different places. But mostly, the issue is transport. It ends up being much easier to mine things on Duna than it is to mine them on Kerbin and send them to Duna. Thus, there is no need for cheap “plot holes” like there being no ore on Kerbin, it simply makes more sense to use ISRU, especially when building/launching ships from other worlds. Same goes for fuel.

Remember in The Martian when the MAV uses the Martian atmosphere to make its fuel? It doesn’t do that because there is no fuel on Earth- it does that for weight efficiency purposes.

[Scarecrow71]

I think resources are far better than funds, regardless of the type of game you are playing.  Take the following 2 examples:

1. Say you are playing a solo game.  KSP1 proved that funds are meaningless once you reach a certain point in the game.  Oh, that part costs 5000?  Just accept a contract or three, and voila!  You have funds.  Eventually you end up with enough funds and you no longer need to worry about how much anything costs.  I've got multiple career saves right now where the average - AVERAGE - funds I've got available are in the tens of millions.  They mean nothing at this point.
2. On the other side of the coin is multiplayer.  The only way funds would be something to deal with is if one person colonizes the only known source of [insert any specific resource here].  That would allow that person to demand (if they wanted) to be paid for access to that resource.  But, again, funds wouldn't really suffice here.  Oh, you've got the only known source of helium?  Well, I've got the only known source of hydrogen.  Let's trade.

[Periple]

☝️

Balancing game economies is really hard! The sweet spot where money is tight enough to create a challenge but not so tight you have to grind a ton or get frustrated is really small. A lot of the time it swings between the two extremes, grindy and frustrating at first and then meaningless. 

Resources that need to be physically moved around are perfect for a game like KSP2 -- they make you explore so you can find where to extract them, build so you can extract them, and fly and set up delivery routes to get them where you need them, all of which is rewarding, self-directed, satisfying gameplay. 

I do think KSP2 has room for a "creative mode" where you can just build anything you like in any VAB anywhere so people who just enjoy the sandbox can go wild, but I'm pretty certain I for one will get a lot of enjoyment out of the resource system when it comes online!

[regex]

I don't think currency really captures the "spirit" of KSP2's scope. At all. Currency would have to scale from the point where you're firing off sounding rockets and tooling around a planet all the way to "gigacredit" costs for interstellar spacecraft, and remain relevant the entire time. It would also be nice to move away from a capitalist mentality for the game, make the Kerbals a little unique in that respect.

Having multiple different resources required to build craft with limits on storage and shipping constraints (even with timewarp) sounds much easier to "balance" than a singular currency, not to mention searching for resources, shipping them, and managing storage sounds much more interesting than managing a singular currency.

[PicoSpace]

Okay here is my take (putting on my dusty game designer hat on here for a moment).

 

What do Kerbals want & value? Exploration.

How do we define “Exploration”? Science Points.

 

So my proposal is that Science Points are the Currency on Kerbal. Trading that science for research for materials (which you can make new rockets with) makes sense…

 

Science ~> Materials ~> Rockets

Science ~> Researched Parts

Science ~> KSC/Colony Building Upgrades

 

For this to work Science needs to be repeatable and time-considered (think Kerblism). Performing a Temperature Scan takes like 1 minute to cycle and kicks out a single science point when communicated back to the KSC (or Colony). So everyday you have a rover/lander running their temperature scan it kicks out Science every minute.

Obviously, it will take time so that’s your “income” rate.  You can get science faster if that craft was flying or even in space. Each biome can be a source of more science but you can’t “double up” the same experiment type in the same area. So it forces you to explore further out if you want more science points faster.

Obviously you can also go out and mine materials yourself, it’s more efficient than paying science points for it, but you have to find them etc. and bring them back to the KSC or a Colony to build new things.

And they could implement missions where interested parties provide you extra science for completing them.

 

Game-Modes Become

- Career (full system in play)

- Sandbox Lite (unlimited resources on Kerbal / Colonies but you still need to research parts with science)

- Sandbox (Everything is Free and Unlocked)
 

Few things to note:

You start the game with enough materials to build a few rockets and set-up a science collection process. 

You can’t trade science points for materials that don’t exist on the planet, and different materials cost differently based on where your KSC/Colony is located. So this forces you “off world” to get all the resources you need to build certain things (like an interstellar ship).

Bringing back materials to your KSC/Colonies is far more incentivized than waiting on science. Science is more idea towards research and Building upgrades at your KSC/Colonies.

Materials “mined” on a planet can be sent to the colony if it’s on the surface of a planet, recovery costs apply (similar to how recovery is done in KSP1). If you drive it back you get full value or build out a transport network.

Lastly I’d like to see science research on an individual part basis rather than “packs”, instead of buying tooling. Helps clean up the editor if there are parts you don’t want/used not shown because you didn’t research them yet.

 

 

Edited July 25, 2023 by PicoSpace

[Kerbart]

The problem is discussing a brand new game feature based on some vague promises. The only thing we've learned so far regarding Intercept's promises is that the execution of those promises, to put it mildly, is generally spectacularly underwhelming.

As a game mechanism, resources can be more forcing than the existing money/science choke points. In KSP1 you can complete the tech tree and make millions without getting past Minmus orbit (aside from the occasional solar orbit).

Resources can be biome-specific forcing players to explore and find them, even more so if their distribution is quasi randomized throughout the system. You can't go interstellar  without colonizing Dres and Eeloo because you'll need the resources there for parts, and so on. A well thought out, balanced system will deliver great challenges. But a shallow system that reduces resources effectively to money with different currencies will simply turn the game into a different grindfest.

Sadly I have seen very little suggesting we're getting the former instead of the latter but I hope I'm wrong.

[PicoSpace]

1 hour ago, Kerbart said:

The problem is discussing a brand new game feature based on some vague promises. The only thing we've learned so far regarding Intercept's promises is that the execution of those promises, to put it mildly, is generally spectacularly underwhelming.

As a game mechanism, resources can be more forcing than the existing money/science choke points. In KSP1 you can complete the tech tree and make millions without getting past Minmus orbit (aside from the occasional solar orbit).

Resources can be biome-specific forcing players to explore and find them, even more so if their distribution is quasi randomized throughout the system. You can't go interstellar  without colonizing Dres and Eeloo because you'll need the resources there for parts, and so on. A well thought out, balanced system will deliver great challenges. But a shallow system that reduces resources effectively to money with different currencies will simply turn the game into a different grindfest.

Sadly I have seen very little suggesting we're getting the former instead of the latter but I hope I'm wrong.

I would hope that whomever is designing the systems would have it that any “rare” resource can be found on at least three bodies. And that resources percentages are biomes specific but if a resource is on a planet, it’s available everywhere at some percentage.

What would be really cool is if there are resource collections for upper atmosphere/low space that could collect gases for fuel etc.

I mean making a destiny style ship would be cool with solar Ram-scoops for exotic particles collection on a tiny red dwarf surrounded by only a binary pair of rocky planets. And by travelling that way we can cut our journey to a habitable star system down by a century.

https://tenor.com/bMVQr.gif

Edited July 25, 2023 by PicoSpace

[Kerbart]

4 minutes ago, PicoSpace said:

what would be really cool is if there are resource collections from upper atmosphere/low space that could collect gases and everything. I mean making a destiny style ship would be cool with solar Ram-scoops for exotic particles collection on a tiny red dwarf surrounded by only a binary pair of rocket planets.

https://tenor.com/bMVQr.gif

I suspect that actual resource collection happens at the colonies. But collecting gasses with kites is an option, and you'd have to launch an atmospheric probe to find out what the proper altitude is.

[PicoSpace]

12 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

I suspect that actual resource collection happens at the colonies. But collecting gasses with kites is an option, and you'd have to launch an atmospheric probe to find out what the proper altitude is.

I’m thinking more realistically, if the planet has oxygen atmosphere it could be collected for oxidizer. If it has carbon-dioxide it could be collected/converted by a part to methane with EC. If it’s got water that’s your hydrogen fuel & oxidizer.

The lower in the atmosphere you go the more gas you collect in your collectées per second. Besides low/high I don’t see a lot of value in specific bands of different gases. That gets complicated very quickly.

Metal would need to be mined from a surface.

I think they mention was 18 resources, although I’m not sure what they all are… and yeah, it’s sounds like a lot to me.

 

Edited July 25, 2023 by PicoSpace