Events

[SofusRud]

This is an idea that came to me whilst playing Europa Universalis 4, which I feel would a cool new dimension to the management part of career mode.

Basically, in EU4 what happens is that at seemingly random times, a pop-up will appear. It will usually cause be a modifier and have some flavor text. It might tell of an event and give you a choice between a number of ways to respond, with various modifiers depending on your choice. Sometimes a particular choice will cause another event to happen and so on.

Something along these lines might be cool to apply to KSP's career mode. These would trigger, some at random, some when certain conditions are met.

For example you might get an event that a manufacturer has had an industrial accident, which causes certain parts to become unavailable for a certain amount of time. Not so bad you might think, seeing as how you can just fast forwards. But it just so happens that due to a combination of an enabled strategy and transfer window opening up another event has popped up and you given a choice accepting a contract with strict time parameters to that planet or suffer a massive penalty.

That's just one example I came up with. Others might include temporary price hikes, a manufacturer might have production problems causing new parts to be have a negative modifyer for thrust of ISP, and so on. They might be timed or only expire if you complete an objective.

I've seen suggestions before for random failures of parts and that sort of stuff, and I'm with SQUAD on this issue, in that if a mission is gonna fail then it had better be my fault. This on the other hand, would allow a more dynamic career mode I feel, and keep the player on its toes. And as it would ideally scale with both difficulty settings and how far the player has gotten, we might not end up with situations where we have to kneecap ourselves or install certain mods to keep the challenge up.

[Bill Phil]

It would probably be better if Squad had officially endorsed challenges. Or a puzzle that must be solved by going to different planets/moons. If Squad played on people's curiosity, it could make people more eager to go interplanetary. And maybe if it weren't so grindy to build large ships in orbit ( refueling them, really) and the planets were more interesting more people would do it.

Your idea is still technically random failures. Just not so random anymore. Plus, it can ruin tried and true launch vehicle designs.