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Contract System Mods?


Streetwind

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While I was playing yesterday and grumbling along in discontent about how the current contract system forces me to bite my fingers constantly in order to stop myself from exploiting to a hilarious degree, I was wondering:

Are there any mods that address these exploits in some way? The three biggest ones, I feel, are the following:

- The abilit to generate an infinite amount of contracts at will, thereby enabling you to force any contract you want to appear when you need it to. Just completed a "return science from X" contract by transmitting from one instrument, but your spacecraft has three other instruments left, and half a dozen other biomes to visit? Just force the contract to reappear over and over, it takes only a few seconds each time! Boom, infinite money, maximum reputation, tech tree fully unlocked. Regardless of difficulty.

- The ability to complete "return science from X" contracts without returning science (i.e. transmitting a zero SP result). Because if you didn't already exploit enough with the above, worry not, there's more!

- The massive amount of science points and reputation associated with part testing contracts in particular. I get about 20 times as much reputation for testing a solid rocket booster in flight over Kerbin as I get for rescuing a Kerbal from orbit (say what?!). In addition, if the difficulty is set at nominal (100%) science payouts, I usually need only two or three easy part testing contracts or so to unlock another node. I could probably effortlessly unlock the entire tech tree without ever achieving orbit, and it would be faster and easier than trying to actually do it through legit gameplay. Especially since the difficulty sliders make legit gameplay just as much harder as they make exploiting less valuable... so nothing really changes regardless of what you set them to. My ideal solution would be to make part testing contracts non-repeatable - that is, a part can be tested "in flight over Kerbin" only once, but it can still generate contracts for testing it in other situations. Until those are completed once, too.

I know that there are mods that add new contract types, and those are all fine and dandy; but what I'd really like to know is whether there's something I can do to close at least these three loopholes?

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Career mode as it is isn't really balanced at all, and where it is balanced, it's intended more for new players learning the game. As such, many have noted that it is quite easy to abuse the system. As career mode develops, we will likely see changes intended to prevent such things, or mods that provide such balance. Until then, the best way to approach it is to choose not to abuse the system. You could choose to directly edit the save file to give you money, and that's not all that far from abusing broken aspects of the contract system, but neither of those ends up being fun. For now at least, put limits on yourself to play as you find it fun, and as career mode comes closer to being finished (with wonderful additions like the Fine Print mod) balance will start to become a priority.

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I'm aware that Squad has future plans for balance passes, yes :) I'm looking for a more near-term solution.

Choosing not to exploit doesn't really work... the issue I have is not that I am forced to exploit, but rather that I have the option. It's actually a common theme in game design - you can look it up in pretty much any textbook on the matter: the mere knowledge of the presence of an exploit lessens the enjoyment derived from playing legit. This is why for example MMOs never release any info about exploits they're patching, even if the effect on the game world is negligible and/or effortlessly reversed. It's a user experience thing.

Also, it wouldn't be so bad if it was a rarely encountered system, but as it stands, if you are playing career mode you must interact with the contract system for every launch, especially at higher difficulty settings. And it's precisely the broken part testing contracts that are often your only options of farming funds on demand. I want to pay for a science mission, but the only option I have to do so is by doing a series of contracts that generates all the science I needed without even launching the mission. This just irks me so much.

My own solution to this is simply not playing career mode. But on the other hand, I've been avoiding it since .24 dropped and I'd like to give it a serious try one of these days. So I thought that I'd come look and see if there were any mods that addressed the most common complaints.

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The difficulty settings are calibrated for someone who has never played KSP before.

If you have the faintest idea what you're doing, then you should [1] probably be playing on hard mode. You should absolutely be playing without the ability to revert mistakes; using revert makes the funding and reputation systems largely pointless.

And yeah, it's easy to abuse the system to grab epic amounts of science. You don't even need the exploits you mention; just use the difficulty menu to start the game with 1,000,000 science in the bank. But nobody's forcing you to; just stay away from the outsourced R&D strategy, and don't use the obvious exploits like spamming flag missions next to a permanently emplaced Kerbal.

And, on the mod side: Fine Print, Kerbal Construction Time, TAC-LS, Deadly Reentry, RemoteTech, etc. As well as adding difficulty in themselves, these mods also block a lot of exploits. Combine Kerbal Construction Time with TAC-LS and your flag-planting Kerbal is going to get very hungry unless you've planned ahead. The greater diversity of contracts in the soon-to-be-stock Fine Print also sharply reduces the ease and temptation of repetitive contracts.

Plus FAR; this actually makes things easier once you're used to it, but the FAR turbojet nerf and the requirement to build aerodynamically realistic ships prevents a lot of exploits. If that's not enough, a self-imposed LV-N ban makes interplanetary travel much more challenging. And, if you really want to crank it up, there's always RSS; even 6.4X makes the game a lot more challenging, especially if combined with AJE.

So: start with hard mode, Fine Print (discourages contract repetition), FAR (discourages lazy unrealistic spacecraft designs), TAC-LS (discourages leaving Kerbals sitting around forever) and Kerbal Construction Time (encourages planning ahead and running diverse missions in parallel, and makes tech nodes require time as well as science to unlock, disincentivising rapid science spam). If it's still too easy, start on RemoteTech; after that, RSS and the rest of the RO suite.

[1] Actually, you should do whatever is most fun and satisfying for your own game, whatever that is. But you know what I mean.

Edit to add: didn't see your later post until after posting this. I get what you're saying about the irritation of self-handicapping, but a bit of it is inevitable in a sandbox game. And the mod recommendations stand, especially Fine Print and Kerbal Construction Time. And, of course, hard mode including lack of revert ability (I keep quicksave/load enabled to guard against game crashes, but if you feel like living dangerously, disable that as well).

Edited by Wanderfound
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I am playing with all the mods you mention, yes :P And it's set to harder-than-hard-mode, with payouts at 50% instead of the default 60%.

Problem is, that actually doesn't solve anything.

1.) Difficulty settings are utterly irrelevant because at the same rate that they make exploiting contracts less rewarding, they make legit gameplay less rewarding. The relationship between the two never changes... If there's a gamplay difference related to contracts between low and high difficulties, then it's the fact that you need to focus much more on the contract system on high difficulty settings because of how constrained you are by funds. This isn't a bad thing because it's believable and appealing to launch missions that have a contractual purpose, but it just makes it that much harder to ignore the obviously WIP system and its various shortfalls and loopholes.

2.) Every mod that adds additional difficulty and/or tedium to legit gameplay only makes the exploits more appealing, because those are not made harder. I get the appeal of playing with FAR and it is not my first time with it, I intentionally installed Remotetech and KCT and Fine Print (and others) to try them out, but none of those are conclusively addressing my specific complaints. I wouldn't be here if they did :P (I still appreciate your attempts to help.)

3.) You can fix Outsourced R&D with a config file edit quite easily (in fact, several other strategies also benefit from adjusting them manually). Sadly you cannot fix contracts that way because they are not defined in a config file. That's why I'm looking into whether or not there are proper mods that do it.

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