Am I Missing Something?

[tstein]

10 hours ago, Audaylon said:

Once KSP 1 missions reach sub orbital tourism you gain unlimited cash.  I don't understand the opening statement, "back on track." as I feel they've always moved in one direction.  And then you end the post with keep it civil.. For just reason as after reading your post I think there are so many undertones and read between the lines within your post, for example,  "but then i remember how game devs tend to work" and "increased cartoonished."  I hope you can find joy in the game in the future.

Under that  lien of thinking then  you also have unlimited  coash in your  real life.  You just need to work more more and more!

 

To have renewable  sources of income does not remove the  value of economics.  It still pushes you to make efficient ships, in order to save money and do less tourist missions. I still feel the game became very very dull without anything to  push you into doing more efficient designs. 95% of my time playing KSP1 was  increasing efficiency of my designs , to be able to reach my milestones with less money.

 

One important aspect that I notice escapes in most conversations is that there are multiple types of players. Some want to see  cool  and beautiful things,  some want to  fight with the rocket piloting, they want their challenge while they fly. Some want to explore.   I ,  I am of one type that do not care for ANYTHING of that. I care for  the engineering and struggle for better and smarter designs.

Edited December 22, 2023 by tstein

[Superfluous J]

 

2 hours ago, The Aziz said:

 

10 hours ago, Chilkoot said:

Did anyone in this forum even bother with a maneuver node for their first Mun intercept, or just eyeball it from doing it 100 times before? 

Yes.

100% same here. However, I only do it to get the encounter. I fix the encounter periapsis in my mid-course correction.

2 hours ago, Periple said:

I even use maneuver nodes to circularize after launch! Every time!

Same. And these ones I make EXACT and I LOVE that in KSP2 I can see the stretch of orbit on which I'll be burning, so I can drag the node to *just* the right place.

20 minutes ago, tstein said:

Under that  lien of thinking then  you also have unlimited  cash in your  real life.  You just need to work more more and more!

Well, if you could work for an hour and get enough money to live for a year, then yeah I'd consider that pretty unlimited.

In KSP1 money was never an object.

[tstein]

3 minutes ago, Superfluous J said:

 

 

In KSP1 money was never an object.

Only if you  reloaded/reverted/ If you played Iron Mode style (each failure cost money)   it  very fast becomes an issue.

[Periple]

22 minutes ago, tstein said:

Only if you  reloaded/reverted/ If you played Iron Mode style (each failure cost money)   it  very fast becomes an issue.

I've done both and I thought money was just overall unenjoyable. It was about grinding stupid contracts until I got the buildings upgraded, after which it was irrelevant.

[tstein]

26 minutes ago, Periple said:

I've done both and I thought money was just overall unenjoyable. It was about grinding stupid contracts until I got the buildings upgraded, after which it was irrelevant.

 Never ever for me.   Maybe   also depended on the difficulty setup for the campaign. But  Contracts rarely  paid me enough to  cover  over expensive   ships. I had to   keep working to make  things cheap exactly so I woudl not have to  do   tourist missiosn Those were just for bail outs.  I reached Duna and EVE doing just 1 or 2 tourist missions. There was the challenge, took a logn time

 

Without the economics, I just strap  a crap-ton of  rockets and I lost the interest in the game in less than 1 evening, that is how  long took me in exploration to  reach  Duna using brute force... and   get bored since there is zero challenge in game.

[Mickel]

But isn't that on you? 

I see people get all upset because of what doesn't limit them.  If lock to target dumbs it down in someone's opinion, don't select it.  Is there anything stopping you from just not strapping a crap-ton of rockets on?  Play with the science and mission reward sliders so they're not as high.

The other thing we need to perhaps bear in mind is that they need all this stuff accessible for the majority so people will go dig and do things that leads to feedback.  I'd like to think by version 0.8, the screws getting tightened a bit.

[Dakitess]

I havent tried the update yet, but have seen 3 videos about it and read some pages around there.

Soooo basically, the "Exploration Mode" is still the same than KSP1 but a bit more refined and with some kind of narrative regarding ground anomalies ? Is there any kinf of real "story", a kind of career to involve the player ? We know there is no money and all, but, so no other limitation than research points to unlock parts ?

I find it a bit deceiving. Actually, I played KSP1 Science mode for about 5 hours at most, and career 0 hours. I'm not the client I guess, but specifically because I find it poorly implemented and lacking of interest, so I hoped something more deep and more enjoyable for KSP2. I'll try it anyway but your feedback are welcomed about it !

[tstein]

19 minutes ago, Mickel said:

But isn't that on you? 

I see people get all upset because of what doesn't limit them.  If lock to target dumbs it down in someone's opinion, don't select it.  Is there anything stopping you from just not strapping a crap-ton of rockets on?  Play with the science and mission reward sliders so they're not as high.

The other thing we need to perhaps bear in mind is that they need all this stuff accessible for the majority so people will go dig and do things that leads to feedback.  I'd like to think by version 0.8, the screws getting tightened a bit.

Under that logic   why to   have physics? why to have  reentry heat? why  not have unlimited thrust?  Limitations  are ALWAYS what makes a game  a challenge and  fun comes from challenge. INf act for me unlocking of parts behind  experimentation is DUMB. The only part that made sense in the career was exactly the economics. IF I coudl I woudl  play acareer mode where  sience only get  me MONEY and prestige and all advancements I get with MONEY.

 

Unlocking a new engine because  I got a sample of  moon soil  makes zero sense and feels dumb for me , IMHO.

Edited December 22, 2023 by tstein

[Dakitess]

I tend to second that, It really does not give any feeling of coherence to unlock techs because of achievements. Of course, it's not completely absurd, because it's a game : it can be understood as a big shortcut like "Congrats for doing that, here is more funds, enjoy" that allow for research and better techs, to go further, please even more Mister President, that will allow for more funds, etc etc.

Why not.

But yeah, it could have been done better. I don't know exactly how, though, and it does not seems to be an easy task ! Money exclusively, actually, why not. But it loose the advantage of Science to allow people to discover the part gradually, bit by bit, for new comers.

[Periple]

2 hours ago, tstein said:

Never ever for me.   Maybe   also depended on the difficulty setup for the campaign. But  Contracts rarely  paid me enough to  cover  over expensive   ships. I had to   keep working to make  things cheap exactly so I woudl not have to  do   tourist missiosn Those were just for bail outs.  I reached Duna and EVE doing just 1 or 2 tourist missions. There was the challenge, took a logn time

I’ve played at various economy settings and it was really rare that I had to grind for a ship. The building upgrades were another story. But I felt that that just added tedium and grind. On the other hand I make my craft as efficient, small, and reusable as possible anyway, even in sandbox mode, I find  that rewarding in its own right. I don’t think I’ve made more than a half-dozen 5m diameter launches ever, and even the 3.75m ones are pretty rare for me!

[Kerbart]

1 hour ago, tstein said:

Under that logic   why to   have physics? why to have  reentry heat? why  not have unlimited thrust?  Limitations  are ALWAYS what makes a game  a challenge and  fun comes from challenge. INf act for me unlocking of parts behind  experimentation is DUMB. The only part that made sense in the career was exactly the economics. IF I coudl I woudl  play acareer mode where  sience only get  me MONEY and prestige and all advancements I get with MONEY.

For the same reason we don't spend 25% of our time watching people go to the bathroom in movies, even when they're (supposed to be) realistic; it's not relevant.

Gravity, thrust, propellant? It's hard to argue that they're not relevant in a game that focuses primarily on flying the spacecraft you designed yourself. Propellant can't be explained away without altering how you play the game; you need entirely different rockets than with infinite propellants. Try playing sandbox with infinite propellant. Meh. Now try playing sandbox without money. Oh wait, sandbox is without money.

Is saying "Our space program is so well funded that money is of no concern to our engineers" unrealistic? Yes, it is. So is a planet with a 600 km radius and one standard G at the surface, but we swallow that.

The problem with money isn't that it adds a constraint. It's a great constraint and I don't mind the game having a constraint that forces to build  ships small and nimble. But that only works if the money is limited. The model KSP1 used—a bank account that needs to be balanced—didn't work in practice because it invariably leads to grinding boring easy-money missions. Yes I need to go to Duna but let me land these 8 tourists on Mun first because that is so much more lucrative, Maybe that wasn't the right approach. Maybe we should have a budget per mission instead of generating income through contracts (I don't know how). But it's far from trivial to fix and not essential to a game that is primarily about astrophysics.

There's a significant lack of innovation in KSP2 when it comes to the game element. So far, what we've seen, is "drop what doesn't work and keep what does." Without really overhauling what we keep. It's not all abd because it meant we lost elements no one liked. Especially a lot of grind. I do think they could have worked harder on Science in that respect as it is a core feature for a game that emphasizes exploration. But money? It's an incredibly hard problem, and unless you get it right, the game is better off without it.

[Chilkoot]

4 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

In KSP1 money was never an object.

It was *so* easy to cheese money (and therefore science thanks to Admin building Strategies) in KSP1's career mode.  You can have a fully upgraded KSC, all science nodes unlocked and 10's of millions of credits after just a few days of in-game time (not IRL time).  This is before ever leaving Kerbin orbit.

Money was a good idea for a mechanic, but the implementation was really just slapped together.  There were a number of other really fun things in Career mode like upgrading buildings and Kerbals gaining experience that added some nice complexity.  If the content gating had been planned more carefully, it could have been really toight.

1 hour ago, Kerbart said:

For the same reason we don't spend 25% of our time watching people go to the bathroom in movies

Fun fact:  The original USS Enterprise had no bathrooms!

[Periple]

I very much agree with @Kerbart and @Chilkoot  here. Yes, material constraints would be nice! But funds in KSP1 are not a good model for it!

I think resources will play this part when they come online, and maybe they could be complemented by funds for launches from KSC — like, resources at KSC would cost funds. Then you’d have some way of earning them that would mesh with the other progression mechanics and not be grindy. Maybe as simple as adding funds rewards to missions, like they now return science.  That could soft-lock you if you screw up, which could be good or bad depending on how you look at it — you can also lose games sometimes you know!

[The Aziz]

1 hour ago, Periple said:

maybe they could be complemented by funds for launches from KSC — like, resources at KSC would cost funds

Meh. I'd just stop launching from Kerbin. And after I reach another system, those funds will be completely irrelevant. A feature that can get forgotten halfway through the game progression, isn't a good feature.

Now resources will always be relevant. Because you not only will have to keep track of them to build your stuff, but there will be gameplay loops around them. Scanning, extraction, refinement. Transport on the planet and surface - orbit. Trade routes.

This is a real game changer, because it's something physical, real. Money is made-up, artificial. 

[Sea_Kerman]

Yeah I imagine infinite resources at KSC will quickly become less relevant when you start establishing other colonies less deep in a gravity well and closer to where you actually want to put things.

[The Aziz]

To be honest if processing of resources in local neighborhood will be faster than transfer from Kerbin, why should I bother sending it from there? If I can avoid building the lifter, the transfer stage, the whatever else is needed for such voyage, because I have the resources available locally just a bit sooner, I will avoid doing that.

[Periple]

46 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

This is a real game changer, because it's something physical, real. Money is made-up, artificial. 

Very much so! I don’t have a strong opinion on money one way or the other, I’m reserving judgment until resources land.

I do think that if money is a system it has to work really differently from KSP1 and I think it should be a relatively simple and low-cost feature precisely because it will become irrelevant once you start building colonies and extracting resources directly.

[Skorj]

Personally, I've just never liked sandbox games.  I want a goal, and a challenge to reach that goal, and the kind of challenge that engages my engineer brain.  If resources are unlimited, then there's no optimization needed, no engineering engagement, no challenge, and no fun.  Self-imposed challenges can be fun after the first playthrough, but that first playthough needs to be good.  I played KSP1 science mode up though Mun landing, and have never touched it (science mode) since. Without the constraint of funds there was a few fun hours of learning the basics, to be sure, but then I was done.

Obviously, my opinion is thus that the game is pointless without some constraint at the beginning that forces optimization.  I'm assuming here that launching everything from Kerbin is intended to be just the early game, and so funds (or some functionally equivalent resource) is ideal for that early game.  Funds are great there because they make sense as a reward for any kind of mission whatsoever, and so don't restrict the game design or require much design effort for something that's early game only.  Whatever progression makes sense to get the player past the early game, the funds reward structure can be made to incentivize that.

Once past the early game, when you're launching from somewhere else, it's also easy using funds to make it impractical to keep launching everything from Kerbin, but have funds be a total non-concern for any other launch location.  For example, you have the funds to get a first colony started in a low delta-V location like Minmus or Gilly, but you need that colony to make further progress, at which point colony resource extraction is the new interesting constraint.

24 minutes ago, Periple said:

Very much so! I don’t have a strong opinion on money one way or the other, I’m reserving judgment until resources land.

I do think that if money is a system it has to work really differently from KSP1 and I think it should be a relatively simple and low-cost feature precisely because it will become irrelevant once you start building colonies and extracting resources directly.

Indeed, I don't think it's at all controversial to say "funds were badly done in KSP1".  Players thought they needed to grind tourist missions and similar, which many people found boring, because of the game's total failure to communicate just how much money you got by ignoring the mission system and exploring new places.  IMO, almost anything different than KSP1 funds would be better. 

But I would add small twist to what you said here: funds should become irrelevant only because you start building colonies and extracting resources directly.  That is, making funds irrelevant should be the in-game reason you need to engage with the colony system and not just launch everything from Kerbin.  Just as for the late game some exotic resource only found on hard-to-reach places should force engagement with the game's full logistics system, whatever that turns out to be.  The point where you also can't just launch everything from early colony locations due to new constraints.

Edited December 22, 2023 by Skorj

[Gargamel]

Aside from a couple quick launches to take a look at the game, I've pretty much waited until some more features were implemented before taking up KSP2.   Now that Science is out, I started playing today.    And as somebody that is not trying to Min/Max the game, The tech tree seems fairly well balanced, so far.   Yeah, I have some minor gripes, but I think that's just part of the gameplay.    Give me a few more weeks and I might change my mind, but for now I'm ok with it. 

[Flyinpenguin117]

I have my own thoughts about tech balancing and I won't call it a non-issue, but its definitely not as big of one as you're making it out to be.

I powered through Tier 1 pretty easily, which honestly is fine. Its all the basic parts you need to get started, you shouldn't have to rush rover wheels and grind chump science at each KSC facility just to unlock landing gear for your first Mun mission. New players won't be overwhelmed by the sheer number of parts available, and experienced players can skip right past it pretty quickly. Once you hit Tier 2, it slows down a lot, and you have to actually put thought into which nodes you want to prioritize and how to maximize your science returns on each mission. One triple-biome hop on Minmus netted me 800 science, enough for 2 nodes, and after doing almost all secondary missions and hitting every experiment in almost every biome on Kerbin, Minmus, and Mun, I'm still ~3000 science short of finishing Tier 2, so you basically *have* to at least send a probe to Duna to progress past that point, whereas KSP1 made it too easy to nearly max the tech tree by Minmus.

[ArmchairGravy]

On 12/22/2023 at 7:30 AM, Mickel said:

But isn't that on you? 

I see people get all upset because of what doesn't limit them.  If lock to target dumbs it down in someone's opinion, don't select it.  Is there anything stopping you from just not strapping a crap-ton of rockets on?  Play with the science and mission reward sliders so they're not as high.

The other thing we need to perhaps bear in mind is that they need all this stuff accessible for the majority so people will go dig and do things that leads to feedback.  I'd like to think by version 0.8, the screws getting tightened a bit.

Agreed. I play on Easy because I have things to do and planets to see. I hate it when people try to make the game so realistic all of the fun gets sucked out of it. This is a game about putting rockets on planets. Some people like to put the teeniest, most efficient rockets on the most effective course to get to the planet. I like to put a few onion stacks around a Mainsail and yeehaw all the way to the planet. There is a bitter, ongoing, decade-long dispute between the two camps and the devs have always been caught in the crossfire.

Edited December 24, 2023 by ArmchairGravy

[chefsbrian]

On 12/22/2023 at 1:54 AM, Dakitess said:

You... Eyeball your TLI ? xD

Always have. Don't remember when and where I learned the trick, but once yer in a stable orbit after launch, you can just wait for the munrise, and burn prograde - you'll get an intercept every time. Really good trick to teach friends who are new at the game, it'll let them get to the mun without having to learn how to use all the transfer tools. Again, helps hook people in to give 'em an easy cool action before moving on to the hard stuff.

[Superfluous J]

4 hours ago, chefsbrian said:

wait for the munrise, and burn prograde - you'll get an intercept every time. Really good trick to teach friends who are new at the game, it'll let them get to the mun without having to learn how to use all the transfer tools. Again, helps hook people in to give 'em an easy cool action before moving on to the hard stuff.

It is good for that, but it's not very efficient.

That said, in KSP if the most inefficient thing is your Mun transfer you're doing pretty good so no big deal.

But I kinda like being efficient