first thoughts/impressions

[kowism1]

hello to all felow space program managers i am Michael Kowis and before i deolve to deeo into reporting a myriad of issues a brief introduction

i am a 25 yr old communications student with a passion for the history of the space race ( both sides of the iron curtain ) i have been working with Maxis as a Dev tester for the last year ( or about 4 seasons in SPM terms) i love looking how these diffrent missions were put together and how diffrent studios recreate the space race in general .

before i delve to deep here is my question and it has to do with the reliability /skill mechanic. How does that system work exactly i am having a hard time figuring out how long to let a mission 'bake' before deploying it and how does the skill come into that mechanic

the answers to that question will enable me to narrow my feedback since to me this game was built around that mechanic

below are my observations

1. it seems that the idea off prestige and money is good however seeing as how over time missions get a prestige deduction and there is a set number of missions at some point there will be no missions that have a high enough prestige award to warrant the time or the effort to reach the budget requirements

thanks for the time to answer my questions
Michael Kowis signing out

[Nacho84]

Hello Michael,

Welcome to the SPM forums!

before i delve to deep here is my question and it has to do with the reliability /skill mechanic. How does that system work exactly i am having a hard time figuring out how long to let a mission 'bake' before deploying it and how does the skill come into that mechanic

Sorry, when you say skill, whose employee group do you mean? SET employees impact the results of your R&D. Flight Controllers kick-in when something goes wrong during a mission and their skill help to save the day. Astronauts skill are factored in along with mission components' reliabilities during the execution of a mission.

1. it seems that the idea off prestige and money is good however seeing as how over time missions get a prestige deduction and there is a set number of missions at some point there will be no missions that have a high enough prestige award to warrant the time or the effort to reach the budget requirements

True. If you continue playing the game until 1990, at some point you'll have performed all missions and there won't be much prestige to be gained. But I think that mirrors what happens in real-life: what would have happened if NASA continued launching the same Apollo missions well into the 1980s? The public would have got really bored eventually and the agency's prestige would have plummeted to the basement, because nothing new is going on to keep tax-payers excited.

Cheers,

[kowism1]

thanks for the insight in order to keep up prestige in the late game here are my 2 thoughs

1. a mission designer which uses from parts unlocked through research will allow you to customize future missions the mechanic would draw from the already in game rocket program menu and the mission payload R&D menu users could either design single use missions or whole programs and the difficulyy which is determined by taking the average difficulty of each subcomponent and coming up with a general difficuly based on the average difficulty of each subcomponent this way users who made new missions/programs which used easy to operate equptment wouldnt be rewarded as highly as those making missions with the high end stuff the balancing force here is that usually the high end stuff has more of a chance for a catastrophic failure

2. until something like thew above comes into place what about the STS ( space shuttle ) missions ( hubble launch of 1989) and the international space station and what of the buran missions ( if there were any )

my thoughts and suggestions

cheers,
mchael

[Nacho84]

2. until something like thew above comes into place what about the STS ( space shuttle ) missions ( hubble launch of 1989) and the international space station and what of the buran missions ( if there were any )

Yes, STS and the ISS are coming in part 2 of the game

Cheers,