Reputation - What does it do?

[DoomtrainInc]

I have been playing and thoroughly enjoying the .25 update but there is one thing I don't fully understand yet: Reputation. So far I have only used reputation as a conversion currency for science and funds. How does it affect your career? Does having a high reputation affect the missions you are offered? I haven't noticed a difference here. Is it possible I am not seeing the payouts for individual missions change based on Rep?

Just curious. It feels like this system would be well rounded out with an additional use for this resource. It would be super sweet if KSC got upgraded the higher rep you earn. You would have a real feeling of progression if statues and monuments started appearing around the flagpole as you complete missions.

[Geschosskopf]

Reputation seems to affect the prices/costs/rewards of other things. It definitely affects the terms of contracts. The higher your reputation, the greater the reward of a contract will be in cash and science. It MIGHT also affect the purchase price of rocket parts, although I'm not certain. In general, therefore, it's main purpose is to be converted into science and/or cash via strategies. However, you don't want to do too much of this because you need some rep to make the contracts worth doing in the 1st place, regardless of strategies.

[tall_guy]

Yeah, I think SQUAD might have included it to discourage us from killing/exploding too many kerbals. But aside from that, you're right, its only good for converting it into more cash/science. Before they added the strategies, I honestly never bothered looking at reputation.

[DrMonte]

I think you get more advanced contracts if you have more reputation. Those more profitable. So you have to keep your reputation in balance.

[Slam_Jones]

I could be wrong, but I believe it also affects the number of recruit-able Kerbals available at any particular time.

[Blind Dead McJones]

Reputation changes the kind of contracts you can get. If you have good reputation, you'll get the nice three-star ones that have good rewards for more challenging requirements. If you get bad reputation, you'll dig yourself into a hole that you have to climb out of, doing less prestigious contracts until you get back to the point that the game will generate better contracts for you. It's also a way to make sure you don't go around killing Kerbals or blowing up buildings, because either of those things are a huge hit to your reputation.

In short, having good reputation makes it easier to get more science and funds.

[LordCurlyton]

It also seems to increase the rewards of the "trivial" ones, and change what is defined as trivial in the first place. Low rep, trivial is low money/science, "test X in easy situation" types, but after playing for awhile, my trivials are cash and rep cows like "plant flag on X" and "transmit science data from X space". I think I get 500-700 rep per flag, and 100k-ish as well. Other than that, not seeing much use. Hopefully next update adds more functionality to Reputation.

[LiveHereNow]

I know I'm resurrecting an old thread... but this is a confusing topic for me still, after 1.0. I'm not sure the effect of rep... I'm tempted to convert it to science heavily b/c once it's at a good level, I'm not sure of any further benefit in going higher. The contracts I get are already pushing the limits of what's possible and the science is holding me back more. Thoughts?

[Prepper-Jack]

I know I'm resurrecting an old thread... but this is a confusing topic for me still, after 1.0. I'm not sure the effect of rep... I'm tempted to convert it to science heavily b/c once it's at a good level, I'm not sure of any further benefit in going higher. The contracts I get are already pushing the limits of what's possible and the science is holding me back more. Thoughts?

Well, at the start of my latest career run I loaded up the rep->cash policy to 25%. When I got the funds, I upgraded the building to the next level and took the rep->science policy at around 50%. I found this to be kind of nice, as it slowed the curve for harder missions, and gave me enough science to rapidly progress in tech. I chose to stay on Kerbin for a while during tech-up, doing suborbital tourist runs and parts testing primarily. Survey missions didn't yield much of anything for the time invested, other than whatever science I could scrape out of it with experiments. By the time I entered orbit for the first time, I had accumulated all of the 90 science level techs (and it didn't take all that much time).

While my reputation was fairly low, it wasn't an issue really. As soon as I got into orbit the first time, I got missions to go to Mun - then Duna, Minmus. Same as usual. To be honest, I think better missions more commonly come with opening up new technologies and completing building upgrades. For example, as soon as I capped the tracking station at L3, I got 3 star missions to capture asteroids and recover parts from the orbit of the Sun.

[KSK]

Interesting - I haven't seen those sort of contracts yet and I'm only a couple of upgrades (VAB, SPH and uh the Strategy building) from a maxed out space centre. I wonder if it has more to do with your tech progression?

Regardless, thanks for the interesting notes on early use of Strategies. Not something I've been doing since I was kinda underwhelmed by running Funds to Science, which put me off early game tweaks to Strategies. Looks like a rethink may be in order.

[g.koster]

I can confirm that the more reputation you get the more contracts will be offered having more stars. AD the beginning you will not get 3 stars contracts and I believe ad 100 you get an additional 2 star contract offered and ad 200 you get your first three stars contract offered. Also I noticed that reputation has a connection to science to be gotten from contracts. Below 0 I didn't get science and above I to get science.