Anyone else who just plays career....

[Beowolf]

I didn't care for career mode in the earlier releases, but wanted to give it another try in 0.25. I liked the contracts, though they're getting dull after three playthroughs. The various perks you can do with the new administrators seemed way too powerful though. Second playthrough I boosted science and the game suddenly got trivially easy. Contracts like rescue missions were paying me over 1000 science and I finished the whole tech tree just relaunching a few ships I'd already built on new contracts with insane science payouts.

But I don't expect balance on the first version of a new feature. Squad'll tune that before release.

Oh, and I tried hard-mode ironman-style twice, but ran out of money both times before getting very far. Maybe I'll try that again...

[SorryDave]

What's another way to progress? 100%ing science? maxing out rep? Making up your own goals isn't really progress in the sense of a built career mode, it's just personal roleplaying.

Having various strategies to progress and making up your own goals or story is what makes this and all open world games fun. Personal role playing is superior game play compared to "completing the main quest" games.

To answer your question: another way to play would be to explore as much as you could with as little technology as possible. Or maximizing re-usable vehicles.

[Caelib]

I only play career and I only play stock. As far as the .25 update, I felt like there were some really great features and changes included but most of the new content and parts don't really interest me. I was kind of excited to create a spaceplane and launch it similar to how the Space Shuttle was -- but I honestly don't find spaceplanes that useful in KSP because of their extremely limited range and cargo capacity. For me, KSP has always been and probably always will be a rocket-based game.