Career mode is broken.

[Talavar]

Downloaded KSP, had coffee, breakfast, came back and fired it up.. Unlocked the whole tech tree in 3 flights.. *roll credits* Game over. Well that was fun... NOT!! either fix the money to science ratio, and if your not going to do that then Honestly what this game needs is some SERIOUSLY overpriced endgame parts. That would balance it out. Something like Oh.. I dunno.. SPACE-STATION PARTS THAT HAVE MEANING. Final piece being something that allows you to VISIT A BLACK HOLE. Yeah.. I know.. unrealistic, but its a game. How about some tech that lets you get through the atmosphere of jool and land on it (somehow) we need SOMETHING to fix this. as of right now, It's REALLY boring. If you want to play and have fun, I'd suggest playing science instead of career. It takes away all the administration and mundane contracts. Makes it like an actual game again. Honestly, the career should have been based on the science collection. Goto the north pole and get a sample, or EVA over kerbin. NO BONUS SCIENCE. Administration should have been a building that dealt primarily with training your kerbals for their added perks.. The whole Career system is completely broken right now. Unless you're looking for sandbox with contracts... well.. there are mods for that. no sense in ruining the game to cater to the casual player.. even on hard, it's ridiculously simple.

[Slam_Jones]

The funds-to-science ratio has been well-noted by basically everyone that's tried it. They are working on balancing it.

As for the rest, well, we're coming up on version 0.90, so there should be quite a bit more to do soon.

[Red Iron Crown]

Kerbal training and experience are coming, likely in the next update. I think the difficulty level for gaining science/funds/reputation has been set deliberately low to make sure players don't get stuck, I would expect significant rebalancing before it goes 1.0. The integration of FinePrint into the core game will give more interesting contracts, including some for station construction if it remains close to the mod.

In short, your complaints are valid but improvements are on the way.

[sal_vager]

Visit a black hole?

I actually really like that idea

And yeah, KSP isn't done yet, patience!

Moving to Dev discussion.

[TinfoilChef]

You could always use the custom difficulty mode to turn down rewards, increase penalties and reduce the starting cash. Then there's the idea of making the whole thing a story.. proceeding in some kind of logical progression toward some eventual (pick your own) goal or a set of goals. If all you do is see how fast you can fill out the tech tree I can understand how that would get boring.

Scott Manley's Interstellar Quest is a shining example of this kind of gameplay. I can hardly wait until he starts using 0.25 to see what series of adventures he comes up with next. Not only is the man a KSP genius, he's one hell of a storyteller as well.

[Talavar]

Kerbal training and experience are coming, likely in the next update. I think the difficulty level for gaining science/funds/reputation has been set deliberately low to make sure players don't get stuck, I would expect significant rebalancing before it goes 1.0. The integration of FinePrint into the core game will give more interesting contracts, including some for station construction if it remains close to the mod.

In short, your complaints are valid but improvements are on the way.

Thank god... I turned it on did a few flights, ulocked everything and kind of went 'nooooooooooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO' (Vaders voice) lol

[Franklin]

Kerbal training and experience are coming, likely in the next update.

Well, experience is coming, but (as far as I know) we're not yet privy to how it's being implemented. Which is weird given we're the testers but that's none of my business. I doubt we'll see actual "training" beyond spamming contracts with new astronauts.

- - - Updated - - -

And like sal said, it's alpha. The balancing is (and should be) deliberately tweaked easy so testers (that's you and I) can test things easier. Balancing is a thing you do late in development always.

[Red Iron Crown]

You might be right Franklin. As I recall, the Astronaut Center building was supposed to eventually deal with training kerbals, but I'm not sure if that's still a part of the plan or not. If it is, it would seem to be the time to do it as the mechanics for differentiating kerbals are being developed. We'll see, I suppose.

[Talavar]

You could always use the custom difficulty mode to turn down rewards, increase penalties and reduce the starting cash. Then there's the idea of making the whole thing a story.. proceeding in some kind of logical progression toward some eventual (pick your own) goal or a set of goals. If all you do is see how fast you can fill out the tech tree I can understand how that would get boring.

Scott Manley's Interstellar Quest is a shining example of this kind of gameplay. I can hardly wait until he starts using 0.25 to see what series of adventures he comes up with next. Not only is the man a KSP genius, he's one hell of a storyteller as well.

Well, yeah.. Ofcourse I try to unlock as quickly as possible so I can get to the outer planets.. However, as I said, even on hard, it was way to simple. I'm glad to hear they are rebalancing. Honestly one of the funnest parts of the game is unlocking new tech so you can do more stuff, It just came WAY too quickly.. I expected a slight boost to science, but what I got was an overpowered, semi-drunken, Monster Cahooned, kick to the science region. lol

[FunnyBunny14]

I made the switch from science career to the normal career, and I must say that it is a lot harder than is described here. I know the science is easy, and with the new biomes coming up it is nearing OP, but the funds make up for everything. It is a lot cheaper to build a rocket with hardly any science parts. The cheapest interplanetary rocket capable of doing material studies, goo studies and temperatur logs (the most basic science parts that are available quote early on), had a proce of about 240000. Almost all those funds are lost during the flight, and to have such a rocket early on would be impossible. I have another rocket, almost an exact replica of one of Scott Manley's rockets, that only cost 28000 funds. It is capable of going almost everywhere, but doesn't have any science parts. I could easily add a thermometer and a batery+solar panel though, so that's not a problem. But these rocket do require LV-Ns, and I only get those after a return trip from outside kerbin's SOI and a trip or two to Minmus. And the rockets needed for those trips cost about 30000 each.

So my question is, how on earth did you manage to complete the entire tree in 3 flights?! Because for me a flight would be the same as pressing the launch button, so unless you only count going into space as a flight I have no clue how you managed to do this.

[Talavar]

I made the switch from science career to the normal career, and I must say that it is a lot harder than is described here. I know the science is easy, and with the new biomes coming up it is nearing OP, but the funds make up for everything. It is a lot cheaper to build a rocket with hardly any science parts. The cheapest interplanetary rocket capable of doing material studies, goo studies and temperatur logs (the most basic science parts that are available quote early on), had a proce of about 240000. Almost all those funds are lost during the flight, and to have such a rocket early on would be impossible. I have another rocket, almost an exact replica of one of Scott Manley's rockets, that only cost 28000 funds. It is capable of going almost everywhere, but doesn't have any science parts. I could easily add a thermometer and a batery+solar panel though, so that's not a problem. But these rocket do require LV-Ns, and I only get those after a return trip from outside kerbin's SOI and a trip or two to Minmus. And the rockets needed for those trips cost about 30000 each.

So my question is, how on earth did you manage to complete the entire tree in 3 flights?! Because for me a flight would be the same as pressing the launch button, so unless you only count going into space as a flight I have no clue how you managed to do this.

If you are not playing on hard, Go get yourself some high paying missions, go to the administration building and turn on the conversions for rep to science, and cash to science. Do those few high paying missions, Unlock everything. You can generally go to the moon on your third flight this way, which generally unlocks everything.

[Starwhip]

Here's a bright idea:

Don't try to unlock the tech tree in 3 flights. You don't need to go to Minmus with the Tier 0 parts.

[KSK]

Here's a bright idea:

Don't try to unlock the tech tree in 3 flights. You don't need to go to Minmus with the Tier 0 parts.

Yup - if doing something makes the game too easy - stop doing it!

There are also plenty of mods out there to give you more stuff to do, make it harder and make it take more time. Purely as an example, I've got a career game running at the moment using Kerbal Construction Time* and RemoteTech. I'm about 120 days in, Bob has just returned from the first Munar orbit mission (following on from Bill's free-return flyby), and I've finally got some comms infrastructure in LKO, so that I can launch un-crewed rescue ships for those stranded kerbal contracts.

Next up - a couple of part test missions, Mun/Minmus relay satellites into Kerbin polar orbit, first Munar landing, and building out my commsat network to the Mun and Minmus to support future missions. Hopefully by the time I get to Minmus, I'll have the tech to put a basic spacestation into LKO for carrying out science contracts, and by then I'd best start thinking about another couple of relay satellites to support my first Duna probe missions.

By then, I'll be juggling interplanetary probe missions with crewed exploration of the Mun and Minmus, and resupply missions to my spacestation (because roleplaying). And I'll only be about 2/3 of the way through the tech tree at best, I would think.

*ships take time to build, tech tree nodes take time to research, both can be accelerated by upgrading the R&D facilities, the VAB and/or the Spaceplane Hanger. Plus a couple of quality of life improvements such as auto recovery of rocket stages, provided that they're equipped with enough parachutes.

Edited November 16, 2014 by KSK

[Rusty6899]

I turned the income down to about 20%. It means that making cash is pretty difficult and you don't really have enough money to be using the admin centre to get a lot of science. I'm probably about 15 missions in (including test contracts) and have only about 300,000 funds. I'm also paying to unlock individual parts so it makes the cashflow pretty demanding.

Saying that, I do have science at 150%, as I find obtaining science is pretty grindy. The thing with unlocking the entire tech tree in 3 missions is that to do it, you have to go out of your way. If you severely limit your funds, and refuse to exploit loopholes, then it is much more time consuming to complete the tech tree.

I think the difficulty settings are pretty well set up for giving players a challenge, especially with the custom difficulty settings allowing players to decide to play a funds limited or science limited game. Maybe difficulty settings relating to the admin building would help as they would reconcile the lack of funds/science balance.

[prophet_01]

Use the difficulty settings and disable quicksaves. That makes stuff a lot more interesting. I also recommend tac life support. That way you can't reach the mun before you unlock electricity. I am also using deadly reentry and ferram aerospace to make recoveries a lot more balanced. Still, those test contracts for the big engines are srsly imbalanced and should be avoided if you want to keep your game balanced.

Comitting to some roleplay aspects is also quite nive, although I guess that's not everyones cup of tea. I am not yet convinced that the devs will be able to get the balancing perfectly right and solve every exploit. Not that they are bad at what they are doing, but it's a complex challenge with the complexity of a physics driven semi-simulation. But it will get better for sure.

It's not broken, it's unfinished

[Superfluous J]

It's not broken, it's unfinished

Came here to say this. "Unbalanced" is one of the clear signs that a game is in Alpha or early Beta. You should start seeing these balance issues go away after (or in, but that's unlikely) the next update.