[1.12.x] Funding Floor - Reusable, Reputational Budget

[ToxicFrog]

Funding Floor -- a career mode gameplay mod

The space program's funding council has deep pockets, but an equally deep aversion to bad press. They will approve any mission, sign any funding request -- as long as the cost falls within what they deem "acceptable risk". If you want to launch more expensive (and thus, in their estimation, inherently riskier) missions, you will need to prove yourself.

Funding Floor evolved out of my desire to play a career game where I never had to worry about running out of money, but where money and reputation still had some use and I couldn't just unlock everything from the start. Mods like Play Your Way and Daily Funds were closer to what I wanted, but not quite what I was looking for. So, once I figured out what I was looking for, I wrote it.

How It Works

Your funds, rather than being a pool of money that can be emptied, are now an upper limit on how much you can spend at any one time. If your budget is $100k, you can upgrade your launchpad and fire a dozen rockets that cost $90k into the sea, and still have $100k to use -- but that $101k rocket remains out of reach.

Your budget is calculated directly from your reputation. Increase your reputation and it goes up; lose reputation and it goes back down. In this way, as your reputation increases, you can plan bigger and more ambitious missions, without ever needing to choose between launching rockets and upgrading KSC, grind contracts to afford that last comms satellite for your constellation, or fast-forward for a month to accumulate the funding for your next mission.

Configuration

Funding Floor has a number of options, configurable via the difficulty options menu at any time. For a complete list, view the README on github.

Compatibility & Warnings

Funding Floor will probably misbehave if coupled with other mods that take over the economy, like KSPCasher. It should otherwise be broadly compatible.

It is highly recommended that if you turn on the options that increase/decrease reputation baesd on income/expenses, you do not use any strategies that convert to or from funds, such as Appreciation Campaign (funds to reputation) or Patent Licensing (science to funds). These can cause weird side effects like gaining more/less reputation than you should, contracts being counted as income and expenses at the same time, etc.

Download

It's available on CKAN! Or you can download the zip directly from github, if you prefer. The source code is also available on github, under MIT license.

Edited September 1, 2023 by ToxicFrog

[theJesuit]

Great idea for a mod.  Looking forward to giving it a go.  So, I assume the funding ceiling affect the ability to upgrade buildings at the KSC?

I wonder how this would work with AngleCan Progression Plus.  Or whether anyone would want to play with both at the same time - the only cost in these is fuel and there is no income stream apart from World Firsts.

Awesome work.  Congrats on the release.

[ToxicFrog]

It applies to upgrades, yes. In effect it means that KSC upgrades are now gated on reputation (and R&D, if you have that option turned on) rather than on funds.

As for combining it with AngleCan P+ -- based on your description, I think what that would mean in practice is that your reputation now determines how much fuel you can launch with, so it would encourage minimal-weight designs even if you have to use much more expensive components to accomplish that. Fuel tends to be pretty cheap, though, so you'd probably have to dramatically lower how much funding it gives you and/or increase the cost of fuel.

[PicoSpace]

This actually sounds pretty logical progression. I’m going to give it a try! I’m going to have to adjust SpaceAge mod to give rep when things happen so that it slowly goes up.

Edited September 2, 2023 by PicoSpace

[Jaxx]

This sounds like a wildly cool idea. I'm guessing it doesn't play nicely with Strategia/Custom Barn Kit? Might have to pop it on for my next save.

[theonegalen]

Very cool indeed! I'll have to try this one out.

[dumpkin]

Working great in my playthrough so far

[Uncommonality]

Unfortunately, there seems to be an issue for me - when I gain funds (like through milestones or contracts) they're just added to the cap. From what I can guess based on the description, that's not supposed to happen?

[AtomicRocketBooster]

This is probably my favorite idea for an economy mod - adds a real constraint you need to build around, but doesn’t require anything gamey and lets you focus on the tech tree. 
 

I’ve also noticed some bugs with contract and milestone funding - I’d be happy to dig into it a little and submit a PR or adopt the mod as needed. 

[AtomicRocketBooster]

So I dug into this a bit by starting a new career and launching rockets, completing contracts, and hitting milestones via console and looking at the logs. Helpfully, FundingFloor has super-informative logging that is invoked anytime rep, science, or funds get changed.

I think it's working as designed, but the scaling/balance is a bit wonky.

• Early game, your budget will double/triple with every minor launch, but your launch costs will not scale to match because early parts are so cheap and rockets are so small. Funding isn't really a constraint at all.
• I expect mid-game, things will get much tighter, as you start launching bigger rockets further away, but you are still only going to the mun/minmus/duna and rep isn't increasing as quickly as costs. I expect funding will be more of an issue here.
• End game as you start launching bigger rockets further afield, rep will probably start picking back up again compared to costs. Depending on how expensive your modded nuclear engines are, you could be hit some gnarly funding crunches late-game.

You can adjust your min/max funding, but making the early game harder will make the late game impossible, or vice-versa. You'd probably need some non-linear curve to get around this.

I'd consider improving scaling by switching the linear interpolation to some S-shaped curve (e.g. a logistic function) for more challenging scaling early on.  It's also be nice to give funds-adjusting strategies some purpose - right now, the optimal choice is to take all the strategies that cost funds since you'll never really pay any of it anyway which feels cheesy.

These are just guesses though - I've only played a very short career with this mod. Currently, it seems like it'll play for the most part  like "science mode with guardrails".

I'll keep playing with this mod and see how it feels, but I might end up testing some code changes and depending on what @ToxicFrog prefers either pushing a PR or adopting the mod.

Edited yesterday at 06:27 AM by AtomicRocketBooster