Currency: sorely missed at this stage of development

[The Aziz]

Early game constraint is available tech. Depending on how soon first inflatable colony parts are available, I'm assuming early tier 3/late 2, the additional constraint of resources will appear.

[Periple]

32 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Early game constraint is available tech. Depending on how soon first inflatable colony parts are available, I'm assuming early tier 3/late 2, the additional constraint of resources will appear.

I know it is now, but I would like an additional constraint that incentivizes efficiency even in the early game. 

[kerballs]

On 2/2/2024 at 12:14 AM, DaveLChgo said:

I do see both sides of the coin very much.    In KSP1 that was indeed part of the challenge to complete contracts to get extra cash. For me it was to the point that every part of every craft flown was recovered and recovered as close to KSC as possible to increase the cash back percentage.  Boosters and every stage had enough parachutes on them to bring them down safely to get the cash.   A second stage normally just sent adrift in Kerbin orbit had retro rockets that I waited to fire again so that it could be recovered as close to KSC as possible.   I even had a crawler next to the launch pad that had huge fuel tanks, several drills, several resource converters.   I sent the rockets to the pad with no fuel, cause it cost less.  Then pulled the crawler up to the pad and connected the two craft via pipes or docks.  After the connection was established the rocket would be filled with the "free" fuel.     I enjoyed that.    (please disregard the cost of the crawler, versus cost of the fuel and how many fillings it would take to break even.  The crawler was federally funded and buried as a line item in the budget, so yeah essentially even that was 'free')

Everyone has made great points! I understand there's going to be a lot more to this game than what we have now. But in simple terms of basic feature/gameplay parity with KSP1, which is a fair comparison to draw, @DaveLChgo put it well here.

The incentive is not only to optimize the launch vehicle for cost as well as part count/performance, but to recover resources. As it stands, I just destroy all my debris and don't think twice about it. The idea of making recoverable boosters is fun, but when my priority is simply getting a vessel to Jool and I can use as many parts as I want with no 'gate', there's zero gameplay incentive to do it.

On 2/2/2024 at 8:13 AM, Bej Kerman said:

Why currency? All the challenges you described can be filled in with a generic resource, the same that'll drive colonies and orbital construction, without a currency system adding unneeded complexity.

What does this add that a resource allowance wouldn't?

Great point! It could absolutely be something as simple as "steel" or "copper". Boom, right there, you've got incentive to recover as much hardware as possible . . . so long as the basic resources are in sufficiently short supply, or resource requirements scale appropriately.

22 hours ago, pschlik said:

And that's just the player perspective; imagine being the developer who has to design, build, test, and bugfix and entire game mechanic which exists entirely to become obsolete after 20 hours of gameplay into a 200 hour campaign. (The devs have expressed multiple times that they don't want parts of KSP2 to simply become obsolete because you unlocked something better. Now, how the Terrier will be useful on Ovin is anyone's guess, but they aren't going to waste time making content that is destined to become obsolete.) It just makes more development sense to have one resource system used throughout the entire game.

Great point, and I had missed that dev commentary.

21 hours ago, steveman0 said:

I could envision a design where production rates on Kerbin are very limited early on but can be upgraded, maybe very much like any other colony, using resources only obtainable from other planets/moons. For example, maybe helium isn't available there at first, but some small production of it becomes available when you upgrade local power production using uranium and mining operations from some other exotic metal.

This might be true of other colonies where the array of resources is diverse but each place specializes in select ones unless you upgrade to enable extraction of some rarer ones.

The important thing to me is that there simply be more early game constraints. Bootstrapping the beginnings of a rocket program is really fun.

8 hours ago, Periple said:

I see, I do need to break it down for you in more detail. I will try.

. . .

Important note: If you answer with anything other than “a” or “b,” I will be forced to conclude that you are not engaging in a good-faith discussion and will stop engaging with you further.

 

@Periple if you dropped the unprovoked *tips trilby*-evoking condescension and intellectual cosplay we could all have a much more pleasant time challenging my opinions. Your borderline hostile attitude is, if anything, the worst display of good faith ITT.

4 hours ago, The Aziz said:

So instead of space exploration simulator (setting up mining outposts for different resources, trade routes, orbital shipyards so that your desired colony extracts or receives exactly the resources it needs) there should be a money sim, where the resources get pulled out of Jeb's bottom...?

And if someone, ever, mentions human economy in on of these posts...

I suppose I ought to hold my tongue until resources hit. Presumably, those resources will matter on Kerbin and in the bootstrapping stage as well as during expansion and mid-game. Perhaps a better way to frame my OP would have been in the context of feature parity. Despite the addition of For Science! there is a missing element of challenge and incentive, particularly in early game. Those constraints matter a lot to me and I wish there were some system in place to give me that feeling.

I'm in a weird limbo where I really love KSP2 and for some reason I don't want to go back to KSP1 despite all it offers. Some strange circuit in my brain makes me feel as though it's 'wasted effort' to play and invest further into KSP1 - I want to feel committed one way or another, but KSP2 is missing about 10% of what I need in order to really FEEL that gameplay loop parity. Maybe I ought to just go play it and enjoy myself, lmao!

[Periple]

44 minutes ago, kerballs said:

@Periple if you dropped the unprovoked *tips trilby*-evoking condescension and intellectual cosplay we could all have a much more pleasant time challenging my opinions. Your borderline hostile attitude is, if anything, the worst display of good faith ITT.

I wasn’t talking to you. 

[steveman0]

Forgive me if this turns out long, I've spent a lot time thinking about this over the last years as colonies, resources, and supply lines have been some of the most exciting features planned for the game.  As I see it, there must be constraints on Kerbin in the future given the stated design plans.

So stepping back for a second, we don't know too much about the resource plans and how colonies will be managed yet.  What we do know is that one of the plans is to enable players to build craft to fly between places carrying resources/kerbals and on successful completion of such a flight enable automated repeating of the flight plan to serve as a supply line of the resources transferred.

From my view of the design, this more or less forces Kerbin to have some form or resources constraint to avoid trivializing the entire gameplay mechanic of supply lines and resource extraction.  Players have already demonstrated rockets that can haul payloads of hundreds of tons into LKO with no resource restrictions.  If all resources remained unlimited and free on Kerbin, there would be little to no incentive to build colonies elsewhere for resource extraction if you could simply setup a supply line from Kerbin with hundreds of tons of the stuff.  Kerbin is already fairly central to the Kerbolar system with pretty reasonable dV costs to fly to any other body in the system.  Interstellar might be the only situation where this logic breaks down, but this is far enough in progression that I doubt they'd trivialize until that stage.

For reference purposes let's call this state of infinite resources of any type as Resource Mode 1 - the current state and as argued above, not really sensible as a solution for the future.

The next least restrictive option, Resource Mode 2, would be to allow common/low tech resources to remain infinite while applying at least a partial restriction on the rarer resources.  While this would disincentivize setting up supply lines from Kerbin by limiting payloads, if the set of resources that is infinite includes everything needed to build at least a basic rocket, players will find ways to build some monstrosity that can still haul 100t+ payloads for free to orbit.  Consider also that we will have orbital colonies.  If you have unlimited resources on Kerbin, you can haul this to an orbital colony where a much larger shuttle could then transit these materials to other systems with the only cost being fuel (unlimited) as this shuttle would be entirely reusable.  This too doesn't seem to make much sense as even low gravity Minmus becomes negligible for setting up operations unless it has some resource Kebin does not have in unlimited supply.

The last I'll group into Resource Mode 3, where all resources are at least partially constrained.  It is only here that the gameplay concept really works.  Limited resources will prevent unlimited launches encouraging preserving these for more important missions.  If the large 100t payload launch consumes all of the resources you generate in a year, you'll be more likely to send components to Minmus to build mining operations to generate the equivalent resources there where they could be cheaply launched to a staging orbital colony for distribution. This will be especially true if it is more resource-cost effective to build up a Minmus colony than it is to upgrade the KSC colony - as I stated earlier, I could see KSC upgrades requiring returning rare materials back from other planets to benefit from the long term advantages of increased production from home.

Now going back to the root of the topic at hand: currency.  Given the above, resource mode 3 makes the most sense.  In this environment currency itself isn't strictly necessary and it is understandable to me why it isn't being considered by the team.  I think there are more fundamental questions that would need to be answered to understand how currency would fit at all.  Unlike KSP1, we don't have procedural, repeatable missions to earn currency.  There has been a fair bit of criticism of these for the repetitiveness that they provided to the game.  I admit that this would be alleviated in KSP2 if these missions could be completed by automated launches much like the supply lines, but then what does this accomplish?

So other than missions, how else would you get currency?  Selling resources?  I don't see this as a good solution as it could encourage unusual solutions like mass mining on Minmus as your only major mining operation, selling the resources and then using your effectively infinite money to buy anything else leading into a quasi resource mode 1 state.  What you could buy with currency would either need to be restricted (quasi resource mode 2) or have exchange rates that made the whole process of selling resources somewhat meaningless.  There's probably a balance where this could work, but I expect it would be tough to achieve this in a stock design leaving players to have to figure out where to put the difficulty slider where they find it works.  I'm not a huge fan of developers pushing gameplay balance onto the player - it's great that the player have the option to adjust difficulty settings, but the default options should make for a good well-rounded experience for most players.

I think I'll stop here to keep this from getting too long.  With so much still hidden behind the design curtain, there are infinite ways we could speculate everything to work.  I find the team did a lot of things right from a gameplay perspective with For Science!, so I'm optimistic they have great plans for the future with resources and colonies.

[kerballs]

2 hours ago, Periple said:

I wasn’t talking to you. 

And yet, loudly demeaning people in a public space demands attention and distracts from the discussion we're all trying to have.

2 hours ago, steveman0 said:

In this environment currency itself isn't strictly necessary and it is understandable to me why it isn't being considered by the team.  I think there are more fundamental questions that would need to be answered to understand how currency would fit at all.

[. . . ]

With so much still hidden behind the design curtain, there are infinite ways we could speculate everything to work.  I find the team did a lot of things right from a gameplay perspective with For Science!, so I'm optimistic they have great plans for the future with resources and colonies.

Totally agree. I've realized my thinking is too narrow on this subject.

I want parity, but KSP2 isn't simply a reskin of KSP1 (as much as some of its detractors seem to think it is). So I shouldn't expect parity when a critical element of the gameplay loop is still in development. I have no doubt that the ~Various Resources~ will be carefully implemented, and that the devs will consider community feedback on implementation and balancing.

I came to KSP1 in about 2017-2018, so the game was feature (and mod) dense by that stage. I wasn't really there for the development process. Gotta remember to have patience.

 

[Bej Kerman]

4 hours ago, Periple said:

I wasn’t talking to you. 

This is  a public forum though, and kerballs is absolutely right in their evaluation. Forcing people to answer the way you want and trying to butt out others joining in doesn't exactly provoke decent conversations.