have we discussed how bankruptcy is impossible in 0.24 as it is?

[MiniMatt]

Oh hell yeah, consequences for failure is something I can absolutely get behind.

Having to restart from the beginning of the tech tree, elimination of all progress and infrastructure, starting from scratch again however - that's something I see as potentially adding zero enjoyment to career mode.

[MiniMatt]

It's for beginners. In every game I've ever played it's been for beginners...hence the name sandbox.

Really? Sandbox is beginner mode?

I mean, I may well be wrong, but every game I've ever played (and I gather we've played rather a lot of the same sort of games), sandbox mode is really something you do after you play the campaign/career mode.

[tetryds]

Yes, but it's not one failure and you are doomed either, making failure possible doesn't mean making failure easy.

But letting you decide how hard you want to pull it for profit seems reasonable to me.

[Blind Dead McJones]

Sandbox is a good way to help people learn the basics when they can use any part in the game to learn things like basic construction and how to achieve orbit, and they can start without having to be restricted to the very small amount of parts (IIRC you don't even have decouplers at the beginning).

I've heard it go the other way though - someone once said that the reason that career mode exists is to start you off with fewer rocket parts and build up to having more options available before you start playing sandbox. That way it instills a more natural learning curve where you first have to learn how to control a rocket before things like gravity turns and all the other stuff.

[tetryds]

Sandbox is a good way to help people learn the basics when they can use any part in the game to learn things like basic construction and how to achieve orbit, and they can start without having to be restricted to the very small amount of parts (IIRC you don't even have decouplers at the beginning).

I've heard it go the other way though - someone once said that the reason that career mode exists is to start you off with fewer rocket parts and build up to having more options available before you start playing sandbox. That way it instills a more natural learning curve where you first have to learn how to control a rocket before things like gravity turns and all the other stuff.

That's why I think Science mode is more suitable for learning.

[NecroBones]

Yeah, I don't see Sandbox as easy-mode. Fewer restrictions, yes, but that isn't necessarily something that makes it easy.

When I first picked up KSP, I tried sandbox mode first, and I had a hard time getting things into orbit at first. My rockets were extremely wobbly, and I couldn't understand why I couldn't make something like a Saturn-V work immediately. So a friend told me to try Career instead, and it forced me to start small, and I figured out what I was doing wrong fairly quickly.

The tech-tree progression seems more like hand-holding compared to sandbox. It lets you learn how specific parts work, and general principles on a small scale too, before progressing to larger and more complicated designs. Of course Sandbox allows for that too, but it requires you to be self-disciplined about it, and almost precognitive in knowing which things you should start with.

That's why I think Science mode is more suitable for learning.

That's what I was thinking. Career will probably work for a lot of new players, but there's always Science for those who find the funding to be too restrictive right out of the gate.

Edited July 16, 2014 by NecroBones

[EdFred]

Really? Sandbox is beginner mode?

Yeah, really. I played sandbox for probably 2 months before heading over to career mode. Then again I have an aviation, construction, and engineering background so everything has been easy mode for me in KSP. (once I learned certain things game specific - like the ability to slide the *$^&@*! manuever node.)

Edited July 16, 2014 by EdFred

[MiniMatt]

I've heard it go the other way though - someone once said that the reason that career mode exists is to start you off with fewer rocket parts and build up to having more options available before you start playing sandbox. That way it instills a more natural learning curve where you first have to learn how to control a rocket before things like gravity turns and all the other stuff.

This second paragraph is where I'm at. I can see that the multitude of parts is rather overwhelming to new players and gradually introducing them is an ideal way of teaching systems and procedures. That said, the tree definitely needs tweaking (and undoubtedly will be) because as it stands, career mode is kind of a challenge mode for old players rather than a learning mode for new players - yes it's perfectly possible to land on the Mun without landing legs, yes it's perfectly possible to jetpack up to the capusle without ladders, but forcing this is requiring greater skills of new players than old as it stands.

But as noted above, I see career as the precursor to sandbox (and the end of career as being essentially quite sandboxy in it's own right) rather than the other way round. That may not be a universal opinion.

Anyway, hype train 502s are making the forums rather unusable at the moment, so I'm going to call it a night on this one and go find some Nordic crime drama on Netflix

[Dhan]

Advances could be based on reputation. If all you do is fail, contractors should think twice about paying you in advance.

[Caelib]

If the risks were so great for a "game over" scenario, most people wouldn't find that very fun or they just wouldn't take any risks at all. There's a magical balance between fun and challenging.

[MKI]

I feel you currently CAN NOT lose the game due to lack of funds. Maybe in the future they will implement a funds related game over screen. But for now it seems Reputation is the main way to lose, but I'm not even sure that game over screen is set up either.

[tetryds]

If the risks were so great for a "game over" scenario, most people wouldn't find that very fun or they just wouldn't take any risks at all. There's a magical balance between fun and challenging.

KSP never failed on reaching that balance, I would not be worried about that.

[Sky_walker]

If the risks were so great for a "game over" scenario, most people wouldn't find that very fun or they just wouldn't take any risks at all. There's a magical balance between fun and challenging.

There's also a magical balance between "fun" and "stupidly easy".

We have two different opinions about that. A sandbox is where little kids play - you know ones that haven't developed the mental or physical capability to play Chess or Go, or golf, base jump, cliff diving, etc... It's a place where you don't get hurt. It's for beginners. In every game I've ever played it's been for beginners...hence the name sandbox.

Agreed. Sandbox mode is stupidly easy. You just pick the largest parts, strap them on, and bang! You're on the orbit in no time. That's how my first experience looked like in KSP and it felt almost like cheating. I went to campaign - and that's where challenge and fun begun.

Edited July 16, 2014 by Sky_walker

[[email protected]]

I don't want there to be a game over screen, but I do want the funding and contract system to be punishingly hard, I can decide when I have failed.

With building reuseable spacecraft one could accept contract while only spending a little bit of the money on equipment (probably mostly fuel).

I have been thinking for some time about trying to find/develope a mod that allows you to purchase fuel for craft landed on Kerbin without having to build an entire truck to drive it out there every time your fuel truck runs dry. Say you could land it on a big flat pad behind KSC that lets you refuel at a rate of X cost per unit of fuel.

[boxman]

Try and remember how hard you failed when you first played the game and reconsider how difficult it should be to fail. I would love a "hard-mode" with tighter budgets and less tolerance for failure, but I think the devs are right to allow new players to ease into it rather than losing all their progress if they make a few score mistakes.

[[email protected]]

Which is why it should have a difficulty setting like that. In fact I wish we could tweak every aspect of it like many other sim type of games.

But I guess they are afraid of noobs selecting the hardcore/hardest difficulty mode and then bitching about how they cant progress... :\

If it has a difficulty setting it should be picked only at the beginning of the save...and not changeable once the difficulty has been selected.

[Superfluous J]

I think based just on the images we've seen, that if you can't turn a profit by doing these contracts, you're not going to be able to launch anything with the advance the contracts are giving you, either.

[Franklin]

Oh hell yeah, consequences for failure is something I can absolutely get behind.

Having to restart from the beginning of the tech tree, elimination of all progress and infrastructure, starting from scratch again however - that's something I see as potentially adding zero enjoyment to career mode.

For sure, and from what I gather here nobody's full-on board with a Rogue-like GAME OVER punishment. As someone pointed out here as well, you also can't win at Kerbal, so perhaps you shouldn't be able to lose at it, either.

But give us some form of error threat. Between quicksaves, bottomless funds, endless contracts, and infinite Kerbals, there isn't really a way to do badly. I mean you can't even re-enter the atmosphere wrong, in a rocket sim. There's no risk with anything you do, really. The biggest threat right now is to your own patience. The 'game over' comes with you crashing that last rocket and just saying eff it and closing the game.

Anyway, this is the first patch to a new system, I'm sure we'll see a lot of changes down the road. I just find it odd they made the game too easy rather than too hard right out of the gate. Perhaps it's out of fear of scaring away new players. Hopefully we'll see a lot of changes.

[Superfluous J]

A very simple and organic lose condition could be reached by only granting new contracts when someone has completed a contract. If you do really poorly to the point where you only have one contract left and only the advance money, you take that contract and fail it and boom - no more contracts.

[cpast]

If it has a difficulty setting it should be picked only at the beginning of the save...and not changeable once the difficulty has been selected.

I disagree strongly with this - all the games I've played where I've noticed have had difficulty easily adjustable mid-game through the regular settings window (i.e. not even going to some cheat/debug menu). Why shouldn't it be adjustable?

[SkyRender]

I'm still of the opinion that Career mode should have a "training wheels" mode by default, wherein you won't have to actually worry about your funds until you've successfully reached orbit. As long as that's in place, you don't need excessively forgiving contracts with absurd advances to protect against dead-ending; if they can reach orbit, odds are good that they're not going to have nearly as many catastrophic failures as your typical first-timer.

[ddavis425]

I have a feeling that keeping a budget and good reputation is going to be far easier than it should be.

[thylordroot]

I was thinking about this when I was coming home from work, and I think I have a plausible explanation for how bankruptcy could lead to the dissolution of Kerbin's space program (based off of nothing but circumstantial evidence and rampant speculation, of course). I submit to you that the Kerbals may (in fact) need the space program to survive. Consider the following:

* Kerbin is apparently sparsely populated, and all Kerbals that share the last surname.

* The Kerbals understand enough about rocket engineering to achieve rudimentary spaceflight (despite the fact that airplanes or even that the wheel constitute groundbreaking research).

* The sole mission of the Kerbals we have seen is discovery. This goal seemingly happens at the exclusion of any other endeavor.

* The Kerbals absolutely refuse to manufacture munitions (at least according to the Wiki).

* Year 1, Day 1 coincides with the beginning of the Kerbal Space Program.

* Money is apparently a new concept and reputation never seems to have mattered before.

One can speculate that at some point in the past, the Kerbals were actually incredibly war-like; perhaps they had the capacity to employ mutually assured destruction and did so successfully. If that is the case, then maybe Kerbin is a post-apocalyptic world and the Kerman lineage really represents the last of their kind; this lineage is maintained either through natural means (like binary fission) or cloning. Because Kerbin is recovering from the apocalypse, accessibility to knowledge is scant, and their manuscripts on basic rocket science were one of the few things they could recover. The space program is merely a distraction to keep the Kerbals from recognizing their true nature; should the space program suddenly become insolvent, there is nothing left to unify the remaining Kerbals, and the descent into utter extinction would begin (perhaps irreversibly).

Yes, this conclusion is about as far reaching as it gets, but hey, it could happen!

[Franklin]

I'm still of the opinion that Career mode should have a "training wheels" mode by default, wherein you won't have to actually worry about your funds until you've successfully reached orbit. As long as that's in place, you don't need excessively forgiving contracts with absurd advances to protect against dead-ending; if they can reach orbit, odds are good that they're not going to have nearly as many catastrophic failures as your typical first-timer.

But this serves pretty much the same end as not having any failure conditions at all. If Squad made it so you couldn't fail until you've proven to be good enough that you're unlikely to fail...

[Alshain]

Total failure (as in you can run out of money and never recover) should not be implemented, except maybe as a "hardcore" mode. We spend hours building up a persistent world only to have a mistake mess it all up without even the ability to reload? No, just no. Some people here have saves with hundreds of hours of work and something like this would be a little too extreme.