Money way too easy to get?

[Tech Enthusiast]

It seems like the payment for missions is a LITTLE out of whack, isn't it?

I mean I need 3-4mil to build a rocket that can fly to any moon, orbit it and even land on it.
A standard mission setup for this rewards 2-3mil for the fly-by, 70mil for the orbit and 500-750mil for the landing.

So, even if the reward would be cut to 1/10th, it would still be crazy high. If it was cut by 99%, I would still double my investment.

Is it meant to be this easy? Feels kinda sad that money is of no concern whatsoever.
So many fine tuning options to make a rocket less wasteful, which is amazing,... but why would I bother, if the payouts are THAT crazy? :-(

[toinkertoy]

If you stick strictly to doing contracts then it prolly is way too much. But I assume that money is there for the player to do other things like build a modular space station, lunar base, etc.

That an the fact I'm sure they're still in the process of balancing things.

[Tech Enthusiast]

Not sure.
You kind of do contracts anyways, since you need the unlocks. And stuff like "land on this moon a few times and on that one a few times" is kind of needed to progress to better tech.
Just taking the contracts for the stuff you do anyways totally negates the need to look at the account balance.

Far into the double digit billions, while still building rockets that cost less than 5mil to get everything done.

Just seems a little too extreme to just be a "work in progress" kinda thing. I mean finetuning, sure. But this is like 100times more than it needs to be. Thats not fine tuning, but rather feels like someone forgot to add the comma at the correct places.

[toinkertoy]

I guess what I meant was the contracts are very limited at this point. I don't even think they have any for manned missions yet (they didn't as of a few weeks ago) So if you want to send a drood into orbit or land one on the moon that right now, it's all gonna be on your dime!

They will be adding more an more (you can actually see the "too do" list of contracts they plan on writing in the contract files) but until then that money is probably meant for those endeavors. Once they add contracts that cover more of what you can do in game they very well may adjust the massive payouts for those first contracts.

[Blueberry Muffins!]

There's so much to learn, I don't think the game can be reasonably tuned to require you learn all of it at every stage to progress to the next. All it can do is require the most basic concepts, because that's enough to get you to the "Moar boosters!" stage, which would *work* if you could afford it and it's ridiculously fun.

There's plenty to play with and learn that doesn't require math or even all that much experience. Do enough of it and you start to notice some things work much better than intuition and your buddies suspected. I think they're trying to get people in that territory.

Your moon-orbit mission costs are about 50× cheaper than the intro-contract payouts, so you've mastered at least one more level of rocket engineering and orbital dynamics than the game requires of you. With even more experience you can get at least 40× better than *that*. I don't think the game should pay only $200K for a luna orbit mission.

[Dr. Manhattan]

It is too much $ but I am enjoying using that cash to do my own side missions like explore way points and to build a space station for droo, luna and cylero plus colonise them.
Ive also been using it to help me complete the steam awards as a side mission.
Since the game doesnt seem to have an End Game concept yet except being a trillionaire.

[Tech Enthusiast]

I guess all the side stuff makes sense kind of.
Still feels like crazy amounts tho.

Not yet sure how to spend all these billions, apart from building a way too big station on the far ends of the system, without having a reason for it.

Guess I expected the game to be further along and that is my issue here.
Since people seem to kind of agree it is an early beta still and most stuff is missing still... at least we have a reason for all the money. To make up our own content that is not included just yet.

[toinkertoy]

well it was a Sandbox game the past 5 years so we basically had to be self motivated to play! The economy dynamics are what's really new (just a couple months now) and not real surprising to me that's gonna take some time to work out.

There already seems to be a division between new and old players now. Many of the old payers won't even touch the career mode and are still uploading tons of craft (from version 0.9.926) that have parts that won't even work in career mode. Even if you have those parts unlocked!

[Tech Enthusiast]

Well. To be fair: KSP2 is around the corner and i likely a much more polished and complete deal / game. I can't see myself enjoying this one for more than a few days, considering how basic it is even compared to the aged KSP1.

Still, kind of expected... more. Oh well. Will be fine for the remaining days of waiting. ;-)

[Blueberry Muffins!]

Umm, KSP's got its strengths, yes, but this game's got its own.

[mreed2]

Originally posted by Tech Enthusiast:

Well. To be fair: KSP2 is around the corner and i likely a much more polished and complete deal / game. I can't see myself enjoying this one for more than a few days, considering how basic it is even compared to the aged KSP1.

Still, kind of expected... more. Oh well. Will be fine for the remaining days of waiting. ;-)

Ummm...

Hate to break it to you, but KSP 2 won't have any sort of career mode or progression at launch. It will be 100% sandbox. So, if "lack of progression and / or challenge" is an issue with this game, it will be infinitely worse with KSP 2 at release.

That being said, yeah, this game has enormous balance problems with career mode at the moment. Those who are trying to justify these errors are... Well, doing the game a serious disservice. If the developers see that players are OK with the current balance, why should they spend the resources to change it?

[LtKillPuppy]

I liked how I could build rockets to reach the nearby moons of Droo but that first "flight through the waypoints" mission for the plane branch absolutely killed me.

I finally had to scour the discussions on here until I could find a highly optimized twin-prop "plane" (more just a bunch of twigs with motors/airfoils on it) that could easily beat the mission. I tried over and over to build my own working plane but couldn't due to just having a few things in the RC/Plane branch unlocked.

[toinkertoy]

They still plan on importing the propeller part from simple planes eventually! It is really the logical choice for the first “learning to fly” contract.

[LtKillPuppy]

I had no idea props were even possible until I saw that custom build.

[Ext3h]

The balance problems with money appears to orriginate from omitting any sort of scale, right? So ANY rocket capable of landing safely will yield the money. Go light enough on the lander, and your whole rocket becomes cheap. Going large only benefits you to out-scale the atmosphere, but does not benefit you with anything beyond drag.

In order to balance the payouts, there needs to be a WEIGHTED PAYLOAD included in these contracts too. Something which forces you to uphold a minimum scale for your final craft and all stages before.

This isn't like KSP, where the lower bound for scale is always set by the need for at least a single Kerbal. Not when in this game, you get automation for free so the need for a Drood doesn't define a lower end for the scale.

Actually, even the science kits in KSP only served this precise purpose, to give you payload for which you need to scale your propulsion.

[mreed2]

Ehhh... The actual problem occurs when you stack lunar contracts -- completing a flyby + orbit + landing with a single rocket produces absurd levels of profits.

The issue isn't "You can turn a profit by completing contracts," which is correct. The issue is that when you complete multiple contracts with a single rocket. The payout as long as you complete one contract per launch is in the right ballpark, but when you complete 3...

There doesn't seem to be an obvious solution to fix this. If you scale the payout for the individual contracts so it produce the right results when you perform one launch per mission, then you punish newbies (who don't realize that one launch can complete multiple contracts, or don't feel confident enough to do so) and that's bad. If you scale costs around the assumption of one launch per contract, then you end up with the issue that we have today.