.24 - Contract feedback

[Lheim]

I'd say that contracts are a very neat addition to the game. Having a randomly generated goal is a nice way to spice up play and force us to do different things than usual - especially combining multiple contracts in single missions makes some creative building necessary. I look forward to seeing the system expanded.

However, a few bullet points just for pure feedback's sake.

- I think there are too many kerbals stuck up in that 100 klick orbit.

- While I'm not looking at this from a newbie's failure-prone perspective, I think it's a little too easy to get much too positive a cash flow going

- There are obviously some impossible contracts sneaking through the random generator - wanting stability enhancers tested orbiting the mun, say.

- 'Science from orbit of X' contracts finally gives us a reason to leave probes or ships around bodies, and that's awesome - but being encouraged to leave kerbals stranded on flag planting duty doesn't feel right from a roleplay perspective.

- more contract types would be greatly appreciated, and in particular more 'long term' style contracts - building stations and satellite networks, crew rotations, ship maintenance, doing surveys etc; See the Extra Contracts or Fine Print mods that have come out for ideas.

- More rewards types than sheer funds or rep would be neat, too: like maintain a satellite network, get fuel delivered to your station by some subcontractor.

I'm also not sure what prestige does right now, but I hope it does cool things in future.

[Sirrobert]

1)I agree. Some variation on the altitude, and maybe a little less frequent for those

2)I believe that's the point actually. First we get introduction to the system, the full ballance and difficulty and stuf will come later

3)I'm sure we'll get some exeptions lists soon to fix that

4)Definitly on the satalites, though I interpet the flags more as incentive for bases than stranding Kerbals

5)I agree

6)Sounds cool, though I'm not sure how that would work out

At the moment, reputation influences what kind of contracts you get. Higher reputation gives you more profitable/difficult contracts

[nadreck]

Was too busy to try 0.24 until this weekend, but I put 0.24.2 on and had a Saturday afternoon full of rescuing Kerbals in Orbit, testing odd things in odd places (put an LFB into orbit to test it for > $700,000 with >$100,000 advance) and I must say this about contracts: I like that while I am waiting for my first Mun Mission (covered by a general exploration contract) to get to the Mun I have picked up science faster than I would have just going to various Kerbal biomes by doing experimental engineering contracts, and I have picked up lots of cash (at 9 hours in on the kerbal calendar I have $1.5M).

Yes, I would like creating a space station, mun base, and similar activities as contracts. But I am taken with the ones asking me to put things in escape trajectories, and of course for all of it, the game is how many contracts can you get with a single mission. Given the costs of 'big' stuff, $1.5M won't come close to doing real exploration with multi ship expeditions. Note that as of 0.23 I have have been trying to keep time elapsed on the Kerbin calendar at a minimum, so I need to be able to do a lot of simultaneous missions. So yes, I am 'farming' contracts for cash to be able to do this. I may also have to work seriously at enhancing my vehicle recovery rate to keep the cash balance up there. I presume I can manage that by putting parachutes and probe cores on boost stages.

[Cdr_Zeta]

Hi,

I think I got 9 hours and only 200K - money isnt too much of an issue; the appearance of contracts is disconcerting as to the lack of good ones; the repetitive ones are saving my game cause I upped Science requirements 30-50%; I may be at a crossroads and cant go any further due to too much Science in my tech tree; not sure yet as I have ways to make more Science still it goes back and forth between Science gathering and contracts; I have a pretty good balance; learned about single staging to save money etc...its a tough challenge; also my Kerbals dont respawn; I only have about 12 or so and none seem to be getting added to the crew.

32bit works for me and the mods I use; quite a few...

Cmdr Zeta

[CalculusWarrior]

I absolutely love sticking a bunch of random parts on a plane, then flying around, activating them at the required altitudes.

[MrXenox]

I agree that more varied, complex, and long term contracts would be fun. I also think additional rewards from contracts would make the system more interesting, perhaps make it so there are a few very useful parts that can only be obtained through contracts. Or perhaps one of the companies could reward you with a stock craft design for you to use.

[Superfluous J]

- I think there are too many kerbals stuck up in that 100 klick orbit.

Agreed. That should be like a 1/1000 or worse chance of appearing. And his orbit should be crazy and not just equatorial at the same height.

- While I'm not looking at this from a newbie's failure-prone perspective, I think it's a little too easy to get much too positive a cash flow going

Agreed, but the only way to fix that would be rubberbanding or difficulty levels. I personally am going the "make everything more expensive in a modulemanager config" route.

- There are obviously some impossible contracts sneaking through the random generator - wanting stability enhancers tested orbiting the mun, say.

Yeah. I still want to try to achieve that one

- 'Science from orbit of X' contracts finally gives us a reason to leave probes or ships around bodies, and that's awesome - but being encouraged to leave kerbals stranded on flag planting duty doesn't feel right from a roleplay perspective.

I have not seen this contract where they tell you the Kerbal has to stay on the Mun after planting the flag. Or are you saying that because the contract doesn't say that the Kerbal has to come back means that you don't bring him back? If it doesn't feel right from a roleplay perspective, then by all means bring him back. I for one never considered the option of leaving him there.

- more contract types would be greatly appreciated, and in particular more 'long term' style contracts - building stations and satellite networks, crew rotations, ship maintenance, doing surveys etc; See the Extra Contracts or Fine Print mods that have come out for ideas.

Agreed on all points. Just in case you haven't heard of it, there's a very cool mod that just came out and is still being worked on that has all kinds of cool contracts in it. It's called Fine Print.

- More rewards types than sheer funds or rep would be neat, too: like maintain a satellite network, get fuel delivered to your station by some subcontractor.

Hah I like that idea, not sure how easy it would be to do it in-game, but it'd be a nice way to mitigate the boring parts of KSP like regular refueling missions.

[Mister Spock]

I agree that the rescue-Kerbil missions appear too often, but I do think they're very useful for us newbs, so it's good to have 2-3 at the start for rendez-vous practice. After the player accepts and completes one or two, I'd make them much more rare.

Being a newb, I unintentionally left a Kerbil on the Mun, as his lander is virtually out of fuel. I'm not using TAC/LS or anything like that, so yeah, he can live there indefinitely and regularly complete plant-flag missions. But after I did 4 or 5 such flag-plants, I found myself swimming in money, so I stopped accepting the flag contracts.

As for difficulty, the devs plan to add more costs, don't they? E.g., a money cost to unlock items, on top of the current science cost? Also, I guess we can play Iron Man, without revert/reload, but I'm not ready for that yet; I make too many newbish mistakes. Beyond that, I suppose they could add options to enhance difficulty, like life-support or communications requirements. And yeah, they could easily implement difficulty levels by adjusting item costs.

[Superfluous J]

Haha I never even thought to just leave a guy on Mun to plant flags. Yeah that's cheap.

One flag per planet is all you should get, period and end of story.

[KerbMav]

One flag per planet is all you should get, period and end of story.

Agreed, should be a story mission (that is what I call them) that never expires, like First Launch.

It might be that way as there are not many mission types right now. Same for the stranded Kerbals.

I am actually not really playing in .24 yet until my mission in .23.5 are done, when I finally do start, I hope the Fine Print mod will be out of its infancy.

Edited July 29, 2014 by KerbMav

[KingPhantom]

they are kerbals! of course will they stuck in the orbit every kerbal-hour! they are KERBALS!!!

don't ask questions - rescue them FAST!

[g.koster]

For one I'm not against illogical or impossible contracts. Scientists being scientist ask impossible questions. Give impossible theories, and the only answer is an experiment.

Think like doing what is the effect of solar winds on reaction services.

I think that what should happen is making them more and more difficult as reputation goes higher. Probably connected to that slower more constant reputation gain.

On flagging the moon, doing science, could be no more than one per biotope, or should have biotope in it. Or say do it by use this experimental box (on the planet ad biotope, in orbit ad height) with 10 different experimental boxes that should work.

Probably we want levels of difficulty, so both experts, and newbie’s can enjoy the games.

Another way around this to permit testing runs. No money involved or may be 1%, no prestige or involved, time keeps running, no pilots can die. Think them as computer simulations.

Long-time contracts should be nice but probably needs some things implemented. Has a problem that at the moment only one space ship is active ad one time. Running these in real live there is one person responsible for the whole project and normally that one is only responsible for that project. They are missing at the moment also a bid of purpose.

Also some contracts are indirectly implemented by some mods the satellite mod with its scanning, some mining mods, some colonization mods, some food mods. My guess is that at some point or these mods will be implemented in the main KSP program or they will create there one missions

[nrec]

Hi,

I acquired the game not a week ago so i'm a newbie but i have problems with a lot of contracts (I only play career mode, I'm not a sandbox guy i guess...).

First, some contracts aren't worth the money of the part you're testing. Mostly when the condition is being "landed" to test the part (seems to give the less money). In some cases you can use the contract as a discount on a part you would have used anyway (for example TT18-A Launch Stability Enhancer), but in some cases, using the part landed is of no use (for example TR-18A Stack Decoupler), so basically if you accept this kind of contract, you're losing money.

Then, some contracts are worth the part, but not worth the ship needed to bring the part to appropriate testing conditions. So this, or minimum strategy, brings us to the idea of trying to do multiple contracts on a single launch. Reading your comments it seems that everybody doesn't have a problem with that, but I find it impossible to check if conditions are met for a particular contract while I have multiple active contracts (mostly when each part requires different altitude and speed requirements). The contract "window" would need to be resizeable or to have an option to pin contracts or sort them for me to be able to do that.

Finally, contracts that never expire (explore the Mun etc.) seem to be worth enough money for the mission and some more.

So if at first I thought I'd had to open a research branch dedicated to testing parts while I'd use the money to explore space, in fact I'm ignoring pretty much every contract except the ones paying a lot and the ones that never expire (it might be that at some point in the game you need to do more testing to still get money but for the moment it works fine this way)...

Anyway brilliant game, can't wait to play some more of it.

++

[lunait]

I think it would be nice to have rescue missions where you have to rescue kerbals from various places on Kerbin itself, and bring them back to the KSC/runway. It might be difficult to implement game-wise, though, since you can recover a craft from anywhere on Kerbin, meaning that you don't have to fly the kerbal back to KSC again once you've landed and picked them up.

[ScopusAurelius]

Guys, you're aware, I suppose, that different biomes exist on Mun? The "plant flag on Mun" missions are carrots to go hit another biome. Hell, you'll want at least 9 flags on 9 biomes to maximize the Mun landing science. You're right; it is not a lot of fun or roleplay to simply leave a Kerb on the Mun to plant flags. But "now go plant another flag" is a bit more roleplay if one keeps their wits a bit and heads off for the poles, for example, this time.

Sticking random parts on a craft and testing them under odd conditions is called "engineering." People complaining about testing a booster splashed down on Kerbin should surely already know that testing is part and parcel to a space program. Not glamorous, but a little profitable. Real-world engineers snort at the tests just like we do. Have fun with it. Save money by collecting the contracts and then building a single, god-awful monstrosity to test them all on one launch. Screen cap it. Share it. Make us laugh.

As far as impossible missions go, just cancel them. It could be worse... In the real-world you're tasked with the impossible without the option to cancel. You can't even ruthlessly pummel the project managers as they so deserve.

[montyben101]

I really dont like the "test X part at X height/X speed" This is kerbal space program not test program

[Doge]

Honestly I was kind of expecting more from the contracts. I mean most of them are just boringly testing random parts in different situations, and only some of them such as the "Orbit Kerbin" contract are actually fun to complete. Don't get me wrong, it's a great addition to career mode, but I barely accept any contracts because most of them are pointless. I just think that they need to overhaul it to make it better.

[rodion_herrera]

(answered, please delete)

Edited July 29, 2014 by rodion_herrera

[Remkeau]

I think that the flag missions should require that the contractor who gives the money is also the one that has it's flag planted. (I already roleplay it like that, why would kerbodyne pay for a rockomax flag on the Mun?) This would also prevent the stranded Kerbal on the Mun scenario.

[Aragosnat]

Guys, you're aware, I suppose, that different biomes exist on Mun? The "plant flag on Mun" missions are carrots to go hit another biome. Hell, you'll want at least 9 flags on 9 biomes to maximize the Mun landing science. You're right; it is not a lot of fun or roleplay to simply leave a Kerb on the Mun to plant flags. But "now go plant another flag" is a bit more roleplay if one keeps their wits a bit and heads off for the poles, for example, this time.

Sticking random parts on a craft and testing them under odd conditions is called "engineering." People complaining about testing a booster splashed down on Kerbin should surely already know that testing is part and parcel to a space program. Not glamorous, but a little profitable. Real-world engineers snort at the tests just like we do. Have fun with it. Save money by collecting the contracts and then building a single, god-awful monstrosity to test them all on one launch. Screen cap it. Share it. Make us laugh.

As far as impossible missions go, just cancel them. It could be worse... In the real-world you're tasked with the impossible without the option to cancel. You can't even ruthlessly pummel the project managers as they so deserve.

I thought there are 16 Biomes on Mün and only 9 for Minmus.

But, on the whole it is way to easy to make money and not a lot to spend funds on so far when you become good enough to build and fly rockets.