Balancing Contract Rewards

[nightingale]

Something I find surprisingly difficult to do is balancing contract rewards. I've laid out my thoughts on some ways to balance the rewards, as well as some of the issues/pitfalls surrounding it. Please, if you disagree with what I've said or have other ideas, post them below and I'll add them to this post!

Types of Rewards

The first thing to mention is that there are three different types of rewards: Funds, Science and Reputation. Because the gameplay use of these "currencies" is very different, a very different thought process needs to go into balancing them. I'll break down my thoughts below on this.

Reward Multipliers

The other thing that needs to be mentioned before getting into the details is the reward multipliers. There are multipliers for the contract's celestial body and for the contract prestige. The multipliers are applied regardless of the type of reward (so the same multipliers get applied for funds, science and reputation). The multipliers are (accurate as of 0.90):

[TABLE=width: 0]

[TR]

[TD]Celestial Body

Sun           4.0
  Moho        7.0
  Eve         5.0
    Gilly     6.0
  Kerbin      1.0
    Mun       2.0
    Minmus    2.0
  Duna        5.0
    Ike       5.0
  Jool        6.0
    Laythe    8.0
    Vall      8.0
    Bop       8.0
    Tylo      8.0
    Pol       8.0
  Dres        6.0
   Eeloo     10.0

[/TD]

[TD]Prestige

Trivial       1.00
Significant   1.25
Exceptional   1.50

[/TD]

[/TR]

[/TABLE]

DMagic is the first one that I'm aware of that did digging to pull these values out in this post, so credit to him (although he doesn't have the prestige rewards quite right due to rounding).

Note the implication of this. If you set the funds reward to 10,000 for a trivial contract on Kerbin, the reward is 10,000. If you set it 10,000 for an Exceptional Eeloo contract, the actual reward is 150,000 - a LOT more than what you may have intended.

Balancing Funds

Funds are arguably the easiest to balance, for the following reasons:

1. Contracts are the only source of funds in stock KSP (except for strategies, but more on that later).
   
2. Meeting a contract typically requires spending funds - which can be used as a basis for determining the reward.
   

Funds required to meet the contract

The easiest aspect to look at when balancing funds is the cost of meeting the contract. For many contracts, it's fairly easy to get a good idea of how much it will cost the player to meet the contract by just building the typical vessel(s) required to meet the contract in the VAB/SPH and looking at its cost. Obviously this approach is easier for a contract like "launch a satellite in LKO" vs. "build a massive Eve outpost". Use this number as a guide for the minimum reward that your contract should offer. I find it can be convenient to just apply a multiplier to this number to reach a possible value for the full reward. You can also use this as the contract advance.

Player time commitment required

Another aspect to look at is - what is the real playing time commitment that is required of your player. It is not appropriate to give a 1,000,000 funds reward to the player for testing a part on the launch pad - as that takes about 5 seconds (and to the point above has a cost of zero funds because they can recover the vessel immediately). Because of this I consider the stock landed part test contract to pretty much be an exploit - there's no good gameplay reason to keep them. More appropriate is giving a large reward for something that takes the player a couple hours of gameplay time to accomplish - like launch a big station.

Balancing Science

For a lot of contracts, balancing science is easy. Set it to zero, and be done with it. The existing system of gathering science through experiments/crew reports is a much better gameplay mechanic for getting science. Also, as it stands science is reasonably easy to get - dumping a ton more into the players economy via contracts may not be desirable. If it makes sense to have science as part of the contract reward, then read on.

R&D Tech Unlocking

The only use of science in game is unlocking tech (again, aside from horribly broken strategies, which I'll get to soon). So the best way to determine how much science to give is by looking at the tech tree and the approximate tech level a player using your contract should be at. The early nodes require 5-45 science - so unless you want the player to be able to unlock a lot of nodes from the one contract, keep the early contract science rewards low (20 or lower). The highest nodes in the tech tree cost 550 (or 1000 for the special nodes that aren't used in stock KSP) - so gives an upper limit for how much science should be rewarded - but I would argue that at that point in the game the player can get lots of science in other ways and doesn't need a ton from contracts.

As with funds, keep the player time investment in mind.

Balancing Reputation

Reputation is easily the hardest thing to balance, for the following reasons:

1. Its use in game is limited - better rep really only means more/better contracts get offered.
   
2. The amount of reputation a player has is not made obvious to the player (the slider goes from -1000 to 1000)
   
3. The amount of reputation a player receives changes based on how much reputation they currently have. I don't have the formula handy, but if a player has 900 reputation, and you try to give them 100 more, they will end up with a total of 950 (or something like that). Effectively, a player can never reach 1000 (or -1000) reputation.
   
4. Strategies are broken.
   

So because of all these factors, most players will see reputation as next to useless, and just apply it towards the +Funds or +Science strategies, thus ruining your careful efforts to balance Funds/Science. So my best advice - keep the reputation rewards low. Reputation has minimal gameplay impact and only ends up breaking the system.

Failure is not an Option

The last thing to talk about is the contract failure values (for funds and reputation). I usually don't even bother. Most players will just quickload or revert, which gives very little purpose in attaching failure values to the contract. In fact, it just gives players more of an incentive to quickload/revert. Yes - there are likely some "ironman" players out there, but I suspect they are the vast minority.

One place where I might actually look at the failure values is if it can be part of an interesting gameplay mechanic. For example, a scenario where the player has two optional paths in a contract (perhaps implemented as two contracts where only one can actually be completed). Then the failure

becomes tied to a player choice - rather than an excuse to quickload. This could also be used to give reputation a little bit more meaning. The choice could be between getting a bunch of funds by bringing back rare unobtanium, but being forced to sacrifice a Kerbal and lose a large amount of reputation. (Could this be implemented via a negative rep reward in a contract? Not sure....)

Another example where the failure values is for a contract where the duration is very long and the player is expected to do other things while waiting for the contract to complete. (eg. stay in orbit with TAC-LS for 1 year, but launch other missions during that time). Then quickloading may not be an option. However, I'd still consider this very carefully - the failure penalty may be viewed by the players as punishing, and may turn them off of the contract completely. The fact is - they've already lost out on the contract reward (and possibly the advance). Taking more funds is just not fun.

TL;DR - Strategies are broken from a gameplay/balance perspective.

Edited March 18, 2015 by nightingale
Typo

[rabidninjawombat]

Thanks for the celestial body multipliers. i was searching for that exact thing.

[TMarkos]

From my perspective, contracts serve two major purposes. They are primarily to allow for a player to progress through career mode and obtain funds, but an important secondary objective is to provide incentive to do things that otherwise would not occur to the player. It's a random goal generator to provide meaningful short-term objectives as well as provide a larger sense of progress through things like the planetary exploration contracts.

From that perspective, the the contract only has to obey a few rules:

• The reward should be enough that a reasonable solution can be found which makes the player a profit commensurate with the effort invested and time spent to accomplish the goal.
  
• The contract should reward exhibited skill in one or more areas (precision, efficient design, etc).
  
• The contract should, where possible, encourage the player to do something they haven't done yet. Repeating the same thing over and over (even in different locations) is grinding and therefore not desirable.
  

I think the best contracts would be ones that have several stages or prerequisites, like the mods that have you launch a station then offer you contracts to expand it. Those are ideal, since now you have progression, incentive and a tangible result of your efforts. Contract packages for remotetech or other infrastructure mods are also nice for the same reason - it's something that expands your gameplay. Unfortunately, stock KSP doesn't offer many infrastructure benefits past having a science lab and having a station to support remote mining.