On Balancing Resources and Fun

[moeggz]

In a prior spaceflight game that many of us were following, the community was having discussions on the topic or resource extraction and how to keep it "fun" while still requiring interesting game play decisions from the player. In other words how to keep it detailed and realistic enough to be challenging but not so advanced to be a roadblock or turn away a majority of players. That other game sadly never reached the point where we could see whether any of our ideas on the issue worked in the game or not.

This is probably a little early to discuss this for where KSA is, but I would like to start a conversation on how resources may be implemented, to hopefully in the discussion introduce the devs to some new ideas that might be worth considering. My idea is still early so a better solution to this problem is likely to be found.

The following is assuming that automated (whether actually rendered or just in amounts) resource delivery routes are eventually added to the game. If KSA is to include both bases and resources I believe this to be a necessary feature. If that assumption is wrong please share with me your thoughts.

I think that implementing resources in a fun way in KSA is challenging because of time warp. A player may want to build a base on a moon with a weak gravity well. They look at the parts for the vessel they want to build and only need to know each resource that that vessel will need, not the amounts. This is because a player who can automate even 1 unit of a resource to a base in even a long mission, say 100 years, can have a practically infinite amount after staying at max time warp for a short irl time.

I believe that KSA is being planned with some life support in mind, and some have suggested life support would be a sufficient deterrent to wanton time warp. I disagree as any life support that is implemented will have to be implemented in a way that doesn't lead to mass chaos when players start going to the furthest planets/interstellar.

As such, my suggestion to this possible problem is to gamify resources just a little. This is by tying secondary base construction restrictions not to a specific amount of a resource delivered there over time, but to the amount of the resource the player has ever self flown to the base.

Let me explain this a bit. I will compare two scenarios, a "kilograms of resource delivered as of the present moment in time" and "kilograms of resource connected by manually flown missions that can be automatically duplicated."

Say for the rocket the player wants to build they need to get 100 kgs of steel to their moon base. There is no incentive to make a mission that can move any amount more than 1kg of steel as they can just time warp to the 100 kgs.

In this scenario, why does the player ever need to look at the total amount of a resource needed? With infinite time warp, building a 4 part rocket and a 500 part rocket is just as difficult, provided the larger rocked doesn't require any additional resource types. A base tied to any value of resource will have enough of that resource instantly at high warp. There is zero player incentive to even have larger resource storage tanks or to build a rocket that moves two storage tanks instead of one. No incentive to ever fly to that base again with a newer and larger rocket either.

In the other scenario (my suggestion) while one must suspend their disbelief a little as the resource at secondary bases will always be "full" of however much you have manually flown to that base, it will never increase beyond that point.

Say the player has made a moon base and has flown one manual route moving 100 kgs of steel to the base. In the base ui, under resources it just says "100 kgs steel," It always has that amount. Time warping does not increase this, nor does launching a rocket with 100 kgs of steel. Immediately after building a rocket with 100 kg of steel the base has another 100 kg of steel. This is hand waved in a game way for the player as auto missions re-flying what you have flown. The player knows each base can make what it has been tied to. There is no incentive to time warp to cheese the system. Players are incentivized to create larger rockets to be able to move more resources in a single player flown flight. Once launching rockets with only 100 kg of steel is insufficient for the player's desires they will take their learnings over their time with the game and build a bigger rocket that can move say 1,000 kg of steel making the base's total 1,100 kg. (one 1,000 kg manual mission and one 100 kg manual mission.) This could make for an enjoyable game play loop.

The negatives is that it is of course less realistic. You don't have to wait for planetary alignment to get more of a resource. If automated routes are displayed to the player they will be purely for the aesthetics of watching craft re-fly the mission the player flew themselves. It may be a bit confusing, but I think a good ui could communicate how this works better that I can.

The positives are that it gives the player a reason to fly to bases more than once, but still with a way to automate it for subsequent missions. Bigger rockets carrying more payload (that are presumably harder to build and fly) give the player something to reach for. This feeds into the loop of build bigger rockets to go further to build bigger bases to build bigger rockets.

So what are your thoughts? Is cheesing resource amounts even a problem? If not, how do you think resources can provide interesting game play and player decisions?

If you agree it's a possible problem, do you agree with this possible solution of have another idea?

 

[Kiwi Shark]

Interesting idea overall but I think you can achieve this through just implementing resource capacity per base. They have to keep all those kilos somewhere! Sure you might be able to send 1000 kg of a material to a base, but it only has storage capacity for 100 kg for example. That creates a second incentive to expand your base and its capacity along with improving your supply quantity.

Power generation/consumption, thermal management, population, resource capacity. All of these could make the experience more substantial. Certain size/mass/tech level vessels could require certain population to be able to fabricate, as an estimate for onsite production chain and ability. Dissipation of heat from factories, passive resource consumption for “maintenance” and sustenance.

Inevitably, time warp makes anything requiring patience negligible. You can try to design around it a bit but it’s a feature that has to be accepted. So making what you’re time warping for the real sauce I think is the key. I think resource logistics is a good way to lead a player into running concurrent missions which adds some more interaction to warping. If you have a mission running a few months you can run some missions that take a few days/weeks while that one coasts. Your agency’s efficiency goes up and the player isn’t just warping single missions at a time.

Hopefully I conveyed some semblance of a coherent thought here! Lots of musing.

 

[moeggz]

@Kiwi Shark You did! Thank you for your comment. A cap on resources or your other thoughts would be great ways to keep bases interesting and give the player organic reasons to go back with bigger rockets.

Which, as I mentioned in the post, is really all I’m after. The specific way that’s accomplished is less important than insuring bases present gameplay decisions and goals for the player.

 

[TheUssLoliChan]

A food for thought, (but im warning you its rambling, and assumes a few things) most all of what will be said in the bullet points ASSUME that everything will be a tiered system with better efficiency, larger things, better etc..

• Resource management such as raw materials
• Colony's exist
• Multi-layer automation exists
• "Resource buses are possible"

Colony's i would feel like would need some form of locked progression where milestones would need to be completed/required to accept more complex resource storage, or holding that resource in larger amounts.. and YES i do include colonies as part of space station/space docks/space habitation system.. This doesn't mean you have to start with basic tech/early tech EVERY single time as you SHOULD be able to build new colonies with larger items/complex items, just that you need a proof of concept verified a couple times elsewhere, or colonies that have passed the milestone x amount of times..

I feel like colonies to keep it a safe bet to limit the amount of resources stored or well, infinite colony resource holding if you decided to cover landmass size of new york full of "resource depots". a way to do it is,

have all colonies have a "workforce" bar, and things take "time" to build/make/store. Some percentage will always be lost to upkeep of the colony itself, and it needs to reach certain milestones to progress to larger colonies.

You need channels built, and doing more yourself makes them possible more often/proof of concept for a single type of ship.. growing your colony takes time, and research is required to get more complex parts.. if you are limited on your kitten workforce, it takes longer to build spaceships/do automation craft ship lines/build more colony parts/make complex refined resources/mining/unloading ships/refurbishing ship/etc. And you would need to set it up what amount of kittens do what.. want faster mining speed, more kittens in the mines!, need ship unloading and refurbishing ships faster, reduce the amount of kittens in the mines and put them there.. Colony at 90% of the workforce on upkeep of the colony and it takes forever to do things with the 10% left, grow the colony workforce with habitation, food, free time zones etc.

(Food is an efficiency and the best you can get is 100%)

You can have an overabundance of workforce going into the 100k's of idling kittens and be at like 2% workforce used and just not have tons of ship lines/resource depots/landings/taking off/creating ships etc, However, you CANNOT have an under staffed work force as all of it would "go to upkeep of the colony" and that will be dependant on what was built in the colony (such as resource depots) and would really limit what you can do with the colony..

(aka make it bigger for bigger ambitions)

Forcing both limited resource holding and a limited workforce requires at least once in a few decades, adding more ship lines either by automatically due to tech progression of the colony OR general tech progression/AI doing them enough times allowing you to manually add more "craft" (low amount), or manually creating them, and doing "blueprint mass upgrades", such as not "having the resources" to make the parts, however in "due time" it will be completed/upgraded.. Resources will deplete or "get damaged"...


Pretty much, the larger the colony, the more ship lines are needed, or colony size needs to grow with the workforce and you cannot just "generate" more workforce it will be very small amount of progress, the ship line can be saturated, the colony can get saturated, causing a flat line of resources being output/input as the colony is saturated and needs more adjustments...

If you decide thats is what you want to waste thousands of simulated years to "beat" the system, eventually, due to lack of colony upgrades, you will be limited on the resource output. but if you are doing that you simply already just don't care to grow.

(this is just ignoring satellites for internet/updates/etc, ill just assume there is just some tech stuff REQUIRED for landing manually or creating "new ship lines" with the "special" tech.)

all this still allows you to have multi planet tech and colonies and still have that one "massive" colony that needs tons of resource upkeep/size, even if its not really "functional," you can still have supply colonies for like depots or mining spots (if you want to do that).
The
problem is truly warp time, and what the end user "wants" gives more growth, resource limits to people that wait and do the work, or let the people that want to warp to the end of the game with resources cause "its 10t per launch" and only 120t per year"....