Jump to content

Thoughts on career economy and difficulty.


Recommended Posts

Problem: With the current contract payouts, expert players need to increase part costs more than 20x before they need to resort to multiple flag planting or science data contracts from the same place on the same mission, while beginners can still run into money trouble. This speaks to some necessity for rubber band difficulty, but also that just changing the amount of money isn't going to be accurate enough to make difficulty match skill level. While I don't think it's beneficial for that type of cheese to be possible, it does show what sort of difficulty range the game needs to cover.

Payouts: First you need to estimate minimum cost to fly a mission. This can be done with a ∆v map/table (I'd suggest this one: http://i.imgur.com/NKZhU57.png) and the minimum payload required to complete the contract(the cheapest or lightest usable probecore or capsule, plus a part to be tested, if applicable). Start with 1k funds per ton of payload at 3km/s, and multiply by 1.7 every time you add another 1km/s.

Exploration missions would have tight budgets. The advance would be equal to the minimum price estimate based on a one way probe, and the completion payout would be a lot of rep, and a little science(no funds). There should be an optional bonus for manned exploration missions, where planting any flag gets you the price estimate for a 1 way manned trip, instead of just a probe.

Commercial missions would have much more forgiving budgets, the advance would be 3x the estimated cost, and the payout would be 10x the cost of the mission, plus reputation(no science reward). An example of a commercial mission would be to launch a communications satellite into a specific geostationary orbit, maybe use the asteroid system to generate a virtual target ship in the desired orbit, so you can see where you want the satellite to go via the map screen and navball.

Government missions(like a "weather" satellite into a polar orbit) would have bigger advances than commercial missions, but give less reputation.

Flag planting missions should require a specific mission flag to be carried from Kerbin. They'd be commercial missions in payout, and should probably have a bonus objective for returning the Kerbal home.

Part testing missions would be commercial missions with science rewarded instead of reputation.

Rescue missions would give a little money(cost of minimalist ship), no science, and a lot of reputation. (Crew hiring should be expensive enough to justify rescue missions.)

Science data missions should require science from a biome/instrument combination that hasn't been exhausted yet. I also think additional biomes on the same planet or moon should give diminishing returns in general, so that the first surface biome you visit with an instrument gives 100%, the second gives 70%, etc. It shouldn't be possible to max out the tech tree with just the mun and minmus.

Reputation: This is an obvious place to go for setting the rubber band difficulty, but it may need tweaking to make it useful for that purpose, such as a reputation penalty for being low on money, or a reputation boost for having over 2m saved up. How do you actually go about adjusting the difficulty? I think the best way would be to make the actual contracts harder to complete, like a flag planting mission requiring a specific biome, a science mission requiring a specific instrument in a specific biome, or a comsat mission requiring a precise 6 hour period at a specific longitude and zero inclination. This way a complete newbie can complete a contract asking for ANY orbit, while better players get tighter and tighter constraints until they start failing some missions. I think failure is a necessary place to dump excess funds, at ALL skill levels. Yes, you need to do some payout scaling as well. It should be tight enough that everybody runs into cost constraints, and needs to do some commercial missions to raise funds for their exploration missions.

Contract availability: I think the availability of exploration missions needs to reflect reputation instead of just being offered X place next, and should expire like the procedural missions. They should have a minimum reputation threshold, and be offered periodically until they've been accepted or completed. This way you can skip places you don't want to go yet, without those exploration missions permanently blocking contracts for the places you do want to go. Commercial missions should require the exploration mission for that place be completed, but flag planting missions probably shouldn't require it.

Edited by TranquilTempest
Link to comment
Share on other sites

This thread is quite old. Please consider starting a new thread rather than reviving this one.

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...