Strategies - Makes KSP too easy?

[Kobymaru]

Hi!

I consider myself a "seasoned" KSP player, so with the upcome of the .25 update I was looking ahead to a more challenging gameplay. So I started a new career with "Hard" difficulty setting (Science Rewards -> 60%, Funds Rewards -> 60%).

Since I recalled from my restart in .24 that Funds are not limiting, but Science is, I adopted the "Outsourced R&D" Strategy with 10% commitment which turns Funds income into Science:

And boy, was I right! I had zero problems with funds but the Science points just kept flowing. Especially since even the Part-Testing contracts now gave huge amounts of Science points too.

I used to think this was a good thing, until I came unto this little juicy contract:

I'm sure KR-2L engines are the height of Kerbal Engineering and I understand that Kerbodyne would pay good moneys to see their gear up in space, but damned if almost half a million funds and 1600 Science points don't break the game!

As you can probably see, this contract brings more funds into my program than I currently have! And with 1600 Science points I can unlock half of the tech tree.

And this is the "Hard" setting, mind you.

So I wanted to ask: is KSP economics too easy? What could be done to make it more challenging?

Here are a few suggestions of my own:

- Simply pay less money on contracts! Bringing that engine up to Orbit is really not that hard. It should not pay half a million Kerbs (Like "Bucks" but not).

- Change the Funds->Science exchange rate drastically

And here's what I think would be really great: Riskier Contracts!

- Deadlines should be less generous, since one can do an almost infinite number of launches in that time

- There should be other ways of failure other than deadline expiration. For example:

* For part testing: you get a !!limited!! amount of that part (like 3-5, or only one in high tech cases like the KR-2L) and if you crash them all without fulfilling the contract, it is considered failed.

* For "planting a flag...", you get also a limited amount of flags that you can put on ships and if you run out, you failed

- Obviously, there need to be more contract types (not just "Explore", "Put Flag" and "Test Part"). If there are other types like "Bring satellite into orbit" or "Bring this Kerbal to that place" there could be other risks involved

What do you guys think?

[Random Tank]

Yeah, the conversion between funds and Science is waaaaay off, because the Patents Licensing strategy is pretty awful... 10 funds for every 1 science I collect? A simple, not exploiting Minmus mission that collects 1000 science with 100% converted into funds probably won't pay for itself... That's stupid!

I'd jump the conversion ratio for funds->science to about 250:1, and for science->funds to about 50-70:1 so you get decent money for science. But yeah, the whole system is a bit mucked up really, the rewards are so high that even on hard you get too much money for some contracts... but then almost nothing for others! They need to fix it, split the mission levels up more, make it so you only really get 3 star mission at high rep, no 1 stars (and vice versa); hopefully they do this in 0.90.0 when they add Fine Print...

Good ideas there though, contracts do need to be harder (that's more than a year to do a 15 minute mission into orbit with a 6.5t payload... WTH)

Also, it maybe from 0.24, but this:

*facepalm*