A try on Perodic Budget

[Kegereneku]

And now you should get why I wrote a "wall of text" to describe something seemingly simpler than your suggestion.

If you make a new thread you ought to distinguish clearly your different type of money-pool and income-sources and explain how the player would interact with them and ultimately stress-test it with hypothetical situation.

For example, earlier you said that slush-money could be used whenever you wanted, however right above you are saying that although Recovered-part goes in slush-pool its money can disappear next year if you didn't used it. A behavior you implied to be limited to budget-income.

Does it mean money from recovered part is considered as a third type of money, or that you cannot actually save money for more than a "fiscal year"

By the way I think it's a bad idea to reason in term of realism when what matter first is game-design.

If only because many people don't know what is realist as much as they think they do (me, you included). Ex : are you including the impending world-destroying asteroid threat in your model ? (doubt it)

Then freedom to spend for the sake of freedom doesn't necessarily make a game interesting or self-balanced, like being free to create an infinite-money-generator.

In my own suggestion I chose to not add a distinct pool of money to store "over-budget" for later use for several reasons.

First, it would facilitate the exploit of building ship and recovering them next budgetday. In your case it translate as converting budget-funds into slush-funds (money that can be used whenever you want, if I still got your idea right).

Second, I want players to take on Contract not only to gain reputation (and raise the budget) but also to maximize the number of useful payload they can launch per time period, encouraging player to make cheaper or recoverable rockets.

Third, add a Planning aspect (with multiple launch mission), which would be short-circuited if you could use a stored fund of money whenever you need it (no different from now where you can have more money than needed but always need to grind it)

So I'm not saying you can't get anywhere with your suggestion, but there's a lot of situation to foresee, explain, cover.

Wouldn't it be sad if the work of a professional game-designer could be sum up in a forum thread in 10 minutes ?

Myself I'm still waiting to see if someone point out fundamental flaws in my idea (other than disagreement over the way the game is meant to be played).

[M3tal_Warrior]

Sorry, I was busy the whole time, nothing serious on your part.

It still ask you to find the reputation to get higher budget (and for refill with your reputation-cost).

So basically we're d'accord, are we?

However for my "call to simplification"

Point is: It is simple. There's two equations needed to a) calculate the current prices and check if the threshold/money is reached/enough (this already is implemented, otherwise the tech tree wouldn't work). It just seems complex, because it's not point-and-klick on this blog post. But so is this thread.

To be honest, I'm quite confused as the methods described here seem to be very very complex.

Have you read your suggestion? Now THAT is complicated. It is for the player, and in terms of programming (multiple bank accounts, fiscal time management, complicated transfers between accounts, multiple types of financial gain...).

Our suggestion was quite easy: Your reputation defines your basic budget value, everything you earn on top is your bonus, everything below will be restocked once in a while, but that costs you reputation. Done. No additional bank accounts, no complicated fiscal time management, no different income routes, no exploits (at least none I can see) and no time warp dependencies.

[thereaverofdarkness]

I see one way to game the system, and before I explain it I want to say I don't think it's a problem in the slightest: you can store excess craft as assets waiting to be liquidated. As with your recovery fraud idea above, a player could build a gradually bigger rocket, or they could just accumulate assets that they can cash in on whenever they feel like it. Rather than treat this like a hole that elitists will take severe advantage of, I say encourage casual players to do it.

I have an idea for a few tweaks to better facilitate this: so clearly it becomes possible to have more money than your reputation. I felt the OP was a bit unclear on whether or not you keep this until it is spent, but I think the player should keep any extra funds they get until they spend them. My idea is that when your budget exceeds your reputation, contracts that you get will have reduced pay with increased reputation gains to compensate. They will also require a larger expenditure. This would be a general rule of course, one could go through the list and find one or two smaller contracts with a bit better pay proportional to costs if they want those.

With this system, players who get several missions going at once will be able to complete explore/plant flag/send data contracts quickly and easily, and then can recover old missions to boost funds, allowing for the taking of bigger contracts and bigger reputation gains. These reputation gains will quickly payout as soon as payday arrives. Now in the event that a player gets reputation and budget higher than their research, the contracts would begin paying less rep and money, and more research to help the player catch up.

TL;DR

In my suggestion: the player is rewarded for advancing one area quickly by receiving help (in the form of adjusted contract scale and pay-type) to advance the other areas up to par.

------------------------------

Along with this, early contracts could encourage the player to plant missions around Kerbin or in Kerbin/Mun/Minmus orbit and keep them there to be used for later contracts. This would inadvertently present the casual player with the opportunity to take advantage of this system without actually revealing it too blatantly.

Edited August 17, 2014 by thereaverofdarkness

[Kegereneku]

I do also know a few way to "store asset" in way I tried to avoid. Rover for example. But this would be a quite tedious affair when I'm suggesting to be able to get money more easily. Plus you would have to first unlock rover part to design the costliest rover ever, so if someone like Cupcake make the effort of building a VTOL Skycrane or Rovers-truck to "store asset" I consider it fair-play.

Rather than treat this like a hole that elitists will take severe advantage of, I say encourage casual players to do it.

Just to say, I consider there is no distinction between "elitist" and "casual" players. Players, skilled or not, want to be challenged and not forced to play a certain way (and even less force themselves to not use the blatantly easy way).

but I think the player should keep any extra funds they get until they spend them. My idea is that when your budget exceeds your reputation, contracts that you get will have reduced pay with increased reputation gains to compensate. They will also require a larger expenditure.

If I only take your first phrase, this is already possible within the Periodic budget suggestion.

You would keep any money earned by contract or recovery that you did not spend last period, the funds would not reset to minimum p-budget.

What you cannot do is stack "budget" as an income indefinitely as time pass (to avoid infinite money through timewarp).

One could think of it as the difference between being "earning private money" and being "allowed to spend 'government' money" but this is still misleading. Here this is more like a third-party refusing to give you more "private money", judging it have should be enough (and you would convince them by gaining reputation).

Now with the rest, I'm not sure of what you are trying to achieve. (and disagree anyway with the idea of balancing reward based on unrelated logic)

Are you trying to balance it so you can have money-over-time indefinitely ?

Or are you trying to correlate reputation/money/research so they all tend to progress at a pre-definite pace (on top of the p-body suggestion) ?

To give my position about progression pace :

The p-budget objective is first to add a new source of money that avoid grindiness while staying as balanced as possible with any playing pace. It is not to globally shape any player's progression (even if not being able to launch 10 rockets per day is a wanted effect).

If a player want to speedrun he would still have to minimize launch cost, and maximize profit, science & reputation through his actions. But if a player want to do whatever he want, he is not forced to gain science to use reputation-budget.

Edited August 18, 2014 by Kegereneku

[Sasuga]

I had thought of a budget idea as well. Basing the budget on reputation also makes sense to me. The rest went in one eye and out the other, so I'm not going to support or speak against it.

I'm in no hurry for this to get implemented, per say, but I think a budget makes sense for a final product in this sort of mode.

[thereaverofdarkness]

Are you trying to balance it so you can have money-over-time indefinitely ?

Or are you trying to correlate reputation/money/research so they all tend to progress at a pre-definite pace (on top of the p-body suggestion) ?

I was thinking more like if you manage to get money super fast, that could improve how fast you can get reputation in contracts, the reason being that how much reputation you have adversely limits how fast you can make money, thus increased reputation gain for money-hungry players who clearly are at the top of their game. The increased research is so that if a player is gaining money and reputation way beyond their current technological means, they can gain tech faster to get them up to speed on it. This one would be more useful to contract who res who are less interested in doing science on missions.

In the end it's just a way to make sure the fast-moving players don't have any unreasonable limitations holding them back. Many players would move at a much slower pace.

[impyre]

A good way to avoid the "gaming" of the system by storing vehicles and parts you have no intent on using seems to be of no real benefit... you may as well introduce a "savings account". However, if you really wanted to prevent it, have vehicles cost upkeep to repair/maintain/resupply/etc. It would decrease the "budget" for each month by a little, and over time it would probably add up to costing more than the initial build. If you wanted to add a reality factor, have the cost of maintenance go up with time (perhaps up to a maximum maintenance cost)... this leads to "time to replace that aging space fleet for something new and shiny (and more reliable)" maintaining things can be expensive... maintaining old things can be really expensive.

edit: the cost of maintenance should also be higher the further from KSC you are... and another thing, it would be good to be able to select which things you want to maintain and/or how much percentage of the maintenance cost you want to pay. (and maintenance should be impossible outside kerbin unless maintenance outposts are created) This would probably merge well with another suggestion in the suggestion forum about introducing maintenance into the game.

Edited August 20, 2014 by impyre

[Kegereneku]

[...]

Well, I said it would require to rebalance reward and reputation anyway.

Under the current model of p-budget, reputation must :

- increase quite slowly so the p-budget range can increase very significantly (it would be bad to go from 10k to 500k in a few day).

- (and including m4t3l_warrior's refil) still have gain regular enough to allow continuous refill (ideally so the budget don't increase unless the player really wanted to).

However I do not like the idea of changing the rules on the run to reshape a player's playstyle to fit a vision.

The rules must be straight forward enough that players encompass it entirely and decide how they want to play.

If a player want big budget fast (IRL time), he will do what must be done. (here in theory, focus on reputation reward)

If a player want to progress fast (game time), he might focus more on money-reward that allow him to fund another mission before payday (ideally he would be able to only use the p-budget as a backup in case of failure)

This make Science progression irrelevant. Players do not necessarily want a impromptu research boost (or feel that the game decide for them) and the p-budget system should be enough to greatly help new players fund "unoptimized" mission to gain science.

And a skilled player will definitely know how to use any amount of fund to gain science at a faster speed.

Thus changing reward on the run following players' progression would be IMO both unnecessary and counter-intuitive.

[...]

Realistically a Space Agency cannot "maintain" anything outside Earth's surface without sending full-fledged mission. The ISS require supply-run & maintenance mainly because it was built specifically to develop such (plus space experiment which is the same) and Hubble's telescope repair then upgrade were extremely costly missions.

In short I consider your idea unrealistic.

If you can create a "saving account" that cannot be turned into a infinite "money-per-time" income I'm all ear.

Myself I expect this issue to solve itself by allowing players to exchange reputation (more than refill) to get funds. (here it would be like modifying the "refill mechanic" to go above-budget at an increased rep price).

Anyway I'm pretty sure that the goal of the administration building SQUAD is working on, maybe even a whole budget mechanic.

[autumnalequinox]

i haven't coded since the days of yore with BASIC and Vbasic (and some C++). just got a copy of visual studio (and I've had the unity kit for some time now). So by the time I retrain my brain to make the mini plugin somebody may have gotten there before me, but we'll see.