Difficulty Level vs Realism

[davidpsummers]

Is playing in Hard Difficulty more realistic, or just harder?

I'm making my first try at the new career mode, after paying for a year, so I figure I could handle more difficult games. But I don't want to do it just for difficulty's sake.

Edited January 20, 2015 by davidpsummers

[bdito]

It doesn't change the realism at all. It's just more difficult by reducing the amount of starting cash you get and the amount cash and science you get from missions and experiments.

[Janos1986]

This is more of a general discussion than a gameplay question but IMO for experienced players hard difficulty is GRINDIER, not harder.

[CalculusWarrior]

The main 'realism' changes that Hard Mode makes are the settings on the left: buildings are destructible, crew permadeath on, etc.

The sliders on the right are just there to show how much cash you want to make off of missions; less means you have to be more careful and economical with your missions. While that certainly is what real-life space agencies have to do, Janos is correct, smaller rewards make the game much grindier.

[ghpstage]

Hard isn't very hard.

The difficulty that was intended to come from restricting players assets is too easily overcome by repeating very easy, no risk contracts. This in my opinion being the real grinding problem, that grinding is the path of least resistance to progress, not that its in any way a necessity.

Though even if you ignore all random contracts and exclusively take the scripted exploration contracts, it still becomes very easy after an initial hump.

Edited January 19, 2015 by ghpstage

[tsotha]

I find the initial hump to be not too bad. The problem is the value of the contracts you get depends a great deal on what technologies you've chosen. I do find I have to be careful to pick technologies that will unlock lucrative contracts, because if you just focus on the techs you want you can find yourself grinding because you're getting mostly garbage contracts, i.e. testing a stack separator for 600, or long distance "do a crew report at X altitude" before you have turbojets. The tech tree problem is particularly acute if you want to research planes early.

Part of the problem is the payouts are a bit unbalanced. Suborbital Mainsail testing pays out more in both money and research than a contract requiring four separate EVA reports from the Mun. I think there's some multiplier based on the tier, so you do a lot better if you go deep instead of wide on the tech tree.

[Torquemadus]

If you're prepared to experiment with the custom difficulty sliders, you can make the game seriously challenging. The reason why players are finding Hard difficulty to be a grindier version of Normal, is because they aren't pushing the difficulty far enough. Hard mode is too easy.

Here are the settings I use:-

I begin with zero starting funds. I have to use advances and rewards to build up enough money to get to orbit.

Most contracts earn back barely enough money to cover launch costs. Through inventive planning, I can find ways to complete multiple contracts with a single launch. Cutting the cost of launches is another important consideration. I often make a fuss on the forums about how much I rely on clusters of solid rockets as cheap first stages.

Setting funds penalties to 200% (the same as Hard) dramatically slows the rate at which I can upgrade my buildings, since I'm paying the same as Hard, but earning far less money from contracts. In many cases, grinding for funds is not an attractive solution. It often makes more sense to find ways to get around limitations than grind unprofitable contracts to pay for an upgrade. I then use the profits from those contracts to pay for the upgrade further down the line.

A good example is the Tracking Station. I learned how to perform regular flights to the Mun and Minmus and back without patched conics, because it was less of an inconvenience to do that than it was to try to find the money to buy the upgrade. Once I had access to Kerbin's moons, I could start spamming survey contracts from polar orbit. I then used the profits from these to pay for upgrading the Tracking Station and other buildings.

Once I had enough tech to launch satellites, they became a major source of income for me. Thanks to my low tech shuttle, I was able to keep launch costs to a minimum.

I'm now preparing for the next big step: Launching interplanetary probe missions without upgrading the R&D building to tier 2. I don't have the patience to grind contracts at Kerbin's moons (although I'm turning a decent profit, so I could do so if I wanted to). I'd rather overcome the limitations of the tier 1 R&D through inventive gameplay than through grinding. The effort of grinding to pay for the upgrade is disproportionate to the benefit I can gain from learning to explore Kerbol's inner solar system without it. Given time, I'll earn enough money to buy the upgrade.

Hard difficulty isn't hard. Since it isn't hard, it doesn't punish players very much for doing a bad job of running their space program. Therefore, players can grind their way past problems by working harder, not smarter. Playing on Hard difficulty encourages bad practices.

Edited January 19, 2015 by Torquemadus
Typo

[tsotha]

Most contracts earn back barely enough money to cover launch costs. Through inventive planning, I can find ways to complete multiple contracts with a single launch.

Which makes sense. But you can't do any fancy six contract launches because you start out restricted to only two. Looking at the way your sliders are set I see a long slog to get to that first upgrade, which gives you just two more.

[Superfluous J]

Personally I think anything more "difficult" than Normal mode is just masochism. I personally take Normal, uncheck all the checks except the top 2 (saving and reverting), and enjoy the game.

Am I capable of playing with 10% gains and 1000% losses, and starting with 0% of everything? Yes. I've done it. It was fun the first time. Any subsequent playthroughs, though, it's just a grind through the exact same stuff so you can get to the fun part.

[Frank327]

I think a good difficulty level is using the moderate settings, but disallowing the revert flight and quicksave options. It won't really be a grind, but you'll still need to get lots of reputation and multiple missions per launch to keep it going fast.

[Th3F3aR]

Revert Flight is still to easy... Once you pushed launch, it's dead or working, that's how the world works

Same goes for quickloading

But to the OP:

Changes on Realism can be done with various Mods like FAR, RemoteTech, ProceduralFairings and TAC LifeSupport.

[tsotha]

This game is still too glitchy to disallow reverts.

[eddiew]

Changes on Realism can be done with various Mods like FAR, RemoteTech, ProceduralFairings and TAC LifeSupport.

This is good advice; realism comes from mods, not from stock. Stock is meant to be accessible, easy fun - and realism isn't fun for everyone

I definitely don't recommend turning off reverts or quicksaves though. There are too many times when a stupid launchpad bug or utterly unexpected and unreproducible event will explode a ship through no fault of yours. But you can use a bit of self discipline and only allow F9 after the kraken attacks

[Sovek]

This game is still too glitchy to disallow reverts.

Life is like that.

[Superfluous J]

Life is like that.

Life sometimes teleports you into the Sun when you step out of your car?

[Th3F3aR]

Life sometimes teleports you into the Sun when you step out of your car?

Happend twice to me, was kinda hot

[eddiew]

Life sometimes teleports you into the Sun when you step out of your car?

Technically speaking the chances of this happening are non-zero... that could count as 'sometimes'

[tsotha]

Life is like that.

Sure, that's fine if you're doing a suborbital test on a decoupler. It's less fine if you spent a bunch of time getting to one of Jool's moons and had your Kerbal fired into the planet when he steps out to do an EVA report.

[Kesa]

This add to realism from a logistic point of view :

- reward : cost ratio is less ridiculous

- "grindier" : I don't think this is the spirit of this mode to scour easy contract (you should stick to main contract instead of doing other and feeling grindy), but if you do, you will spend more time on unmanned mission, and will do more than 1 mission on Mun before heading outside Kerbin SOI, just like RL. Also, you won't unlock half of the tree using barely RT 10 and 48-7s (I did in Hard), you will have more time to be forced to build and optimized craft with technological constraint

However, unless you like sattellite or survey contracts, you may want to stay unrealistic on the numbers of rocket you ever launched. You should rather get mods that add life support and antenna range, and maybe konstruction time or whatever you like. You can even get Realism Overhaul for really true challenge (I'm new to it and the 18t restriction just barely allows me to put a very light probe to orbit, while in stock ksp, you can barely do manned Mun and back on rocket with it, and probably low tech manned Ike and back if using a basic jets first stage).