Seeking Tips for Reasonable Self-Enforced Rules for Losing

[thylordroot]

Greetings,

I am in the process of getting a video series going for the the new Career mode, and thought I would set some rules for myself that would make losing possible. I know that (at least at present) there is no concept of losing in the game, so these are things would probably end up being self-enforced (that is, by deleting the save when I have violated one of the losing conditions). I was wondering if anybody else has given this any thought, and if so, I was hoping that we might compare notes.

So far, the two mechanisms that I can see for losing are reputation and funds. I am not sure if it is possible to go into debt (or if the worst that can happen is to hit $0), although I do know that the devs have always had an out in mind. I do know, however, that is it possible to drive your reputation into the ground, and I think this would be a good starting place for such a rule set. Here are my thoughts so far:

• The game could end if my reputation gets low enough. The justification here is that recurring failure causes the Kerbals to lose faith in their space-fairing prowess, and they might question whether or not they are even meant to be in space at all.
  
• The game could also end if I can find a way to say that the space program has become insolvent; if so, the space program dies a political death since there it has become clear that the management cannot fund it. My testing indicates that it is not possible to go bankrupt; no matter what I do, I can't seem to get my funds under $12.
  

For the former, I'm thinking the game terminating condition might be when I hit red ( <= -1000 reputation), although that almost seems like it'd be too easy; it seems like you have to kill a lot of kerbals to do this. Alternately, I could make orange the cutoff point here, as that seems to be much easier to get to. The funding problem seems like a harder one to tackle though: are there any suggestions for a reasonable cutoff point here, or should I just not worry about it?

[Pecan]

I applaud your aims but think career is the wrong target. 'Career' is meant to provide a fun way for people to always win,as far as I can tell. It is structured about chucking Kerbals into space and then grinding science (plus a bit of contract money) to get parts.

The only way to introduce 'logic' into it is to stick with sandbox; flight before space, unmanned before manned and parts to enable science, not the other way around.

[thylordroot]

A note to any mods who might see this: in hindsight, I think I placed this in the wrong forum. I just realized that this is probably better placed in Challenges. I apologize for this, and I'll try not to let it happen again.

I applaud your aims but think career is the wrong target. 'Career' is meant to provide a fun way for people to always win,as far as I can tell. It is structured about chucking Kerbals into space and then grinding science (plus a bit of contract money) to get parts.

Noted; I could do what Bob Fitch is doing with his Project Odyssey series and manage a SandBox game externally. It seems to be working out pretty well for him, but somehow it just doesn't feel right doing it this way. The greatest appeal of using Career mode is that I am substantially limited in what I can do, and that means that it's not a question about what seems appropriate, but rather whether or not what I'm doing what is feasible. For what it's worth, if the game can enforce those restrictions on me, all the better, since it limits bias caused by forgetfulness on my part.

I am currently looking into mods that might help the fun factor (as in Dwarf Fortress "fun") in this way. I definitely think it's time to start looking into things like Ferram Aerospace, Deadly Reentry, and TAC Life support. I guess what I'm looking for are self-imposed rules that will keep things interesting.

The only way to introduce 'logic' into it is to stick with sandbox; flight before space, unmanned before manned and parts to enable science, not the other way around.

This is one wrinkle I've never really liked about the tech tree. I, too, would prefer to see the tech tree arranged in this manner (although I can understand why Squad implemented it in the way that they did). There are tools like TreeLoader that might be useful in this regard, but I haven't tested it and I'm not sure how well they integrate with contracts yet.

[Pecan]

Challenges is not the place for this - that's for challenges you set other people, not ones you set for yourself. Fan Works > Mission Reports or Live From Mission Control might do you.

All in all, as I said, I sympathise with you because I have the same problem. It is entirely possible that the people at NASA/ESA/SpaceX and others have it in real life too - they want to go to Mars but have to grub around with unethical Murdoch hegemony satellites again ;-0

Right now though you seem to be asking two different things - what should constitute 'losing' and what mods to use. I'm afraid I have no useful advice for the former. For mods RT2, KAS and Kethane make communications (non-Fox), bases and mining necessary or at least useful. My own favourite is SCANSat for mapping satellites - although note the current version uses ModStatistics so you may want to avoid it. I don't know how familiar you are with the aesthetic mods - EVE, Distant Objects and others but for video they would probably be very convenient. FAR and DRE I wouldn't worry about so much, depending on how much you want to mess around in atmospheres as opposed to in space.