Slitherine

While astronatus not being sent into space or scientists not having anything to work on seem perfectly legit motivations for lowering morale, it seems far less sensible to have the same thing happen to mission control.

In the current flow of the game, there is a naturally occuring pause between missions that require a larger (10-11) mission control crew. This occurs after launching the mercury missions and before gemini gets researched up to any reasonable level. During this time the player can prety much send just a few unmanned missions that require 3 ground control.

This results in mission control crew getting low morale because of the low amount of staffed missions, which is already pretty weird.

Now in my game I also had an unlucky first launch gemini failure. This resulted in a 3 season delay which caused some of my mission control personnel to quit. This in turn prevented me from launching the fixed gemini mission, because the amount of active mission control operators was too low (the replacements of those that quit were in training). Before the replacements got out of training, more mission control people quit, requiring me to hire and wait for more replacements - again not being able to launch missions.

In short, this created a vicious circle of mission control crewmen quitting becuse there were no missions launched, while not being able to launch missions missions was caused by quitting crewmen.

Overall this seemed to me a very unrealistic and "gamey" mechanic, which was a very obvious 4th wall breaker.
I can't imagine real mission control crew get so upset because of a launch delay caused by some technical rocket failure which they had nothing to do with in the first place.


So I suggest changing the morale mechanics for mission control crew. Either base their morale solely on the wages, or lower their morale only when missions are launched and they are not assigned to them. A case of a whole department waiting for the rocket or other piece of hardware to be fixed shouldn't cause morale drops in mission control staff. That's just unrealistic.

Good pointed.
+1

I agree. +1.

Another excellent suggestion by Sabratha. Hence I'll just say "Me too" once more

Also, mission failures should lower the morale of assigned MCs, and a catastrophic failure should have serious consequences at this level (as said Gene Kranz after the Apollo 1 disaster, "it was getting back to work after the Week-End or quit that job forever").

N_Molson wrote:Also, mission failures should lower the morale of assigned MCs, and a catastrophic failure should have serious consequences at this level (as said Gene Kranz after the Apollo 1 disaster, "it was getting back to work after the Week-End or quit that job forever").

be careful with penalties for catastrophic failures. Right now it's quite difficult to achieve and conform to reality, I do not want to imagine what would happen if in addition to the systems, personnel, astronauts, etc., lose moral ...

Is anything being done about this yet!?!

This isn't a simple problem, there are a lot of factors involved. Also the game is evoluting quickly, so those factors are moving. There will be adjustements here like in almost all others areas of the game.

But consider that a lot of people quitted Mission Control with the end of Apollo. No manned flights happened until the Shuttle, and Mission Controllers were simply bored, especially because they had known the thrill of the lunar landings. I recommend the documentary "Failure is not an option, part 2" (featuring Gene Kranz), on that subject.

To quick-fix it, you can raise the salaries a bit (usually, 5% is enough for me).