Matrix Games Forums

After a hard RL week finally focus my attention in 0.7.8 and play.

My thoughts:

1-Failures. I think the program manages the calculations in a different way. In the earlier versions remember you can do a success (with luck)with a RD 70% up in safety factor. Now seems impossible make a success with below 90%. And i have a lot, A LOT! of failures with 95% and 96%. Weird. Upset. In my opinion this is an error so the player it's forced to no assume risk.

2-Because playing you harvest a huge number of failures, this cost money, a lot, so many, many missions never flight. It's a nonsense spent money in Biosatellite, OFO, Luna 2, etc, missions with doubtful objective in this situation. I think this kind of missions should be another way to be rewarded. No prestige and money, by exemple. You had success in Biosatellite then you get 1000 additional $ each season this period. Then it makes sense to spend money with them.

3-IMHO would be great adjusting a little the penalization in RD after failures. It's hard, excessive. If you get two failures in critical missions...goodby to minimal aproaching to historic path.

4-Some situations must be corrected. In my play, get a lot of failures in Gemini program, two deaths, two scrubb missions because the agena-dock blow up at lauch (TWO TIMES), so decide to investigate and RD the short moon missions at same time. Whithout a SINGLE DOCKING MISSION with success with Gemini, my personal had success DOCKING at first try the Gemini-moon-flyby and return to Earth. Weird and probably impossible.

5-Money, money..i think the budget progression must be adjusted when new missions are added because this changes the path. Now i found the first 8 years more or less "in control", after that no money to other missions. I cannot send probes (because the constant failures in Mercury/Gemini). Only capable to show my head again when the budget jumps to 12000 each season.

However, enjoy the game, A LOT! The game it's better each week, but a lot of work to do.

Cheers.

Hello fremen,

Thanks for the feedback. I'll adjust the values for the next update so that you can give it a go and let me know if things improve. I don't remember if I mentioned this before, but I used to have a system where I could write a text script containing all the actions performed by the player and then run a command line program that would "play" the game and output the outcome for every season. Unfortunately (or luckily!), we have introduced so many moving parts to the game that the idea of running such a script became pointless.

Regarding point number 2: remember that you are playing sandbox mode now, so the idea is that you make your own objectives and set up your own goals. Those "side" missions such as Biosatellite, OFO, Luna 2, etc will become more important in the campaign mode because you can use them as a relatively inexpensive way to increase your prestige in order to compensate for the failures occurring in your manned programs.

Cheers,

I concur with fremen's comments on reliability. The current figures skew the game into taking many more years than the historical progression.

- The "diminishing returns" with R&D does have some validity, I've been in plenty of projects where the "estimated completion" figures increase by less and less from week to week. "We're 70% done... Now were 85%... 92%... 94%... However, since we're dealing with 3 month seasons, I think a minimum of at least 3-5% gain would be more reasonable.

- The reliability improvement from successful flights has been seriously downgraded sometime over the last few builds. When I first started playing with 0.74, it only took a few flights to bridge the gap between "Max R&D Reliability" and "Max Reliability" as you generally got a couple of percentage points each flight. With 0.79, the reliability increase for a successful flight is either 0% or a fraction of 1%, which means one will likely never get Max Reliability. I think the reliability increase back in 0.74 was more realistic; for example there were only 2 unmanned Gemini flights before they started sending up crews.

- Meanwhile the reliability hits for unsuccessful missions are far more severe with the current model. In BARIS, one only got reliability hits when somone got killed, otherwise even a single successful mission step would get some reliability gain. I think BARIS reflected history well in that respect; as telemetry from a problematic mission would provide valuable information for the next flight.

Consider these examples of aborted missions from the same time period:
-- Gemini 8: Near fatal situation with stuck thruster, but crew survived. Gemini 9 launched just 3 months later.
-- Apollo Fire: Can't be reflected in current game mechanics, as it didn't take place during a flight. However, I expect "Random Events" will be added sometime, in which Astronauts can be killed in accidents, and reliability hits (or bonuses) could happen.
-- Apollo 6: Unmanned Saturn V/Apollo test, problems with 1st, 2nd, and 3rd stage caused abort of translunar injection of unmanned Apollo spacecraft. However, the information gained from this flight was invaluable in readying the Saturn V for Apollo 8 eight months later.
-- Apollo 13: Well, that would equate to a moderate reliability hit in-game, with Apollo 14 not being launched until 10 months later. However, no unmanned test flights were required, and with the extra oxygen tank and other improvements, I think the Apollo 14 spacecraft was MORE reliable than Apollo 13. One way to implement this in the game would be that as flight successes increased Reliability beyond past Max R&D reliability, Max R&D could be increased by the same amount, so if you did take a hit, you could make it up with R&D rather than more test flights.
Example:
--- Research a rocket until it reaches Max R&D value of 90%.
--- Successful flights raise reliability up to 95%, Max R&D also rises to 95%
--- Mission failure knocks reliability down to 85%
--- One can now use R&D to get reliability back to 95%, to "get where you were before" without neccessarily needing test flights.

Thank you for your input. Your suggestions have been logged and sent to the developers. I know they are working on varying what a "failure" is, to better simulate events like Gemini 8 (they had completed the docking objective, but then had to abort to save the crew).