Matrix Games Forums

Here are some ideas I've been thinking about in order to make the game more engaging to players.
The overall idea is to make the player have to make more strategic decisions, involving trade-offs between money/prestige and time. By doing so, I think we increase player engagement with game. With that said, here are the ideas:


Deep Space Network


Either make it a requirement for Lunar/Planetary probes, or increase the costs/decrease prestige for not having it when a Lunar/Planet mission is flown. Here, the player is balancing upfront costs to establish the network with lower downrange costs and or increased benefits when planetary missions are flown. As I envision it, the basic "Deep Space Network" model will allow for Lunar probes. Additional upgrades would be needed for the Solar/Mars/Mercury/Venus planetary missions. Further upgrades for the outer planet missions.
Alternatively, don't make the Deep Space Network a requirement, but increase the cost of probes if designed without the network. This would reflect the necessity of having more powerful transmitters and power sources on the spacecraft, lower data rates, etc.


Launch Windows
Have lower cost (or higher prestige) associated with launches and missions scheduled for certain times.
This would reflect the use of taking advantage of planetary alignments. For example:

• Voyager (when implemented in the game) must be launched on 3rd Quarter 1977 to do the "Grand Tour" (Jupiter/Saturn/Uranus/Neptune)

• Mariner 10 mission must be flown in 4th quarter 1973 (or other suitable dates that would allow for use of gravitational slingshot. We would have to calculate these) to get bonus points for visiting both Venus and Mercury .

You could also expand this idea by allowing the player to buy a back up vehicle (at additional cost) that he could use if the launch failed, in order to meet the launch window.


Use of Universities for probe design:
Early in the spaceprogram, it was decided to use university, vice governmental researchers for some of the probe design. To reflect this, allow the player to select to have university assistance in researching probes when a program is initially opened. The player would get a single free engineer for the probe research,
but the researcher would have random quality stats and could not be fired without a prestige hit.

One more idea: have certain missions or accomplishments effect the success rates of the manned missions. For example, the Pegasus micrometeroid satellite accomplishment would effect the safety of the Gemini and Apollo missions. Although we know now that micrometeroids are not as significant a problem at they were thought to be in the early 1960's, by giving reliability bonuses to manned missions for these missions, the game requires the player to make strategic risk/reward decisions, which adds to both the excitement and replayability of the game.
If this idea is included, I would give reliability bonuses to manned missions for the following missions:

Pegasus-Reduction in danger to micrometeroids
Pioneer 6-Reduction in danger from solar flares/storms
Biosatellite and OHO-reduction in danger to human crew, or possibly an increase to their fitness statistic?

Your suggestions have been logged and sent to the developers. Adding realistic mission windows has already been suggested before; I think the developers want to be sure that the 4-season-year is going to stick before they tackle the mathematics of calculating those windows during the entire timeframe of the game.

One more idea: To duplicate some of the strategic trade offs NASA had to make in the late 60s-70s, have the player have to choose expending launch/engineers on Earth Science (weather satellites, earth mapping, etc) type probes with low/no prestige value to maintain funding levels.