Slitherine

Well, I've completed a few playthroughs and I thought I would share my experiences with the game so far. I am an avid player of the original BARIS and I looked forward to trying out this remake.

I've played through three times, all on Hard difficulty. The first playthrough ended in 1972 (or maybe it was '73) as I was midway through the Gemini Direct Ascent program - I ran into the game-ending error I described in the tech support forum. I made a lot of mistakes in that game. I didn't manage my budget carefully, made too many facility upgrades, hired too many staff, and didn't have enough cash for the lunar missions.

The second playthrough ended with the same error in Gemini Direct Ascent, but I managed my budget better and was able to get that program started in the late 1960s.

The third playthrough was the most interesting. Since I kept getting that error in Gemini Direct Ascent, I decided to go the Project Apollo route instead. I had some catastrophic failures in Project Mercury and Project Gemini that resulted in astronauts burning up on reentry - but fortunately the errors occurred after I had opened up the next program and I was just trying for duration milestones. Thus I was able to just move on to the next capsule program without too much lost time. I ultimately achieved a lunar landing in Q4 1969. It was very hard trying to get a moon landing by the end of the decade. In 1967-1969 I was launching a Project Apollo mission every season and if any of them had failed I would probably not have been able to meet the goal.

Good points:

1. The art style is effective.

2. The interactions between budgeting, morale, and research in your strategy is pretty deep and should keep even experienced strategy gamers interested. For example, it is very easy to over-hire and over-build as I did on my first playthrough. Another example is that it is often advantageous to launch satellite or probe missions for morale and research carryover reasons even though they don't directly help with a manned lunar mission.

3. Overall, the experience was fun and rewarding, a good update of the classic BARIS experience. I'm looking forward to the implementation of more ahistoric and Soviet program and component options.

Questions/concerns:

1. Has personnel gaining skill upgrades from participating in missions been implemented? I thought this was supposed to be present in 0.7.14 but I didn't notice it in game. The only skill upgrades I saw were from advanced training.

2. I don't understand how mission control personnel skills or astronaut skills affect the success/failure chance of a mission step. I used the most skilled personnel possible (generally higher than 90% in all mission control positions) but I'm not sure what that did exactly. The success chance bar on the right of the mission screen seemed to match the component reliability pretty tightly, so I'm not sure what the personnel skills do.

3. I used US programs exclusively and I don't understand why I would want to mix and match US and Soviet programs in the GSA campaign. Wouldn't reliability/research carryover mean it is more advantagous to stick with one or the other?

4. Will it be fair that US has to research Thor/Agena, Atlas/Centaur, Atlas/Agena, Saturn I, Saturn V, etc. while the USSR can just put everything on a Proton?

5. Overall, will the GSA campaign be interesting enough without an opponent? I didn't really feel any sense of urgency except when I was trying to get the lunar landing in 1969, which was a self-imposed goal.

6. Prestige numbers seem too high right now. I was able to get the max budget increases with no problems at all, often having many times the amount of prestige needed. Again, this might be an effect of not having an opponent who might get some milestones achieved first. Another affect of this is that the prestige granted or lost from short-term goals was meaningless. I ended up ignoring several short-term goals in my push to complete Project Apollo.

7. The reliability loss from skipping a milestone (30% I think) seems too extreme in some cases. NASA never launched a manned suborbital Apollo flight IRL, but I had to in the game. I also think they skipped a manned lunar pass IRL and went straight to manned lunar orbital. That would have been suicidal in the game.

8. Some required milestones seem too heavy-handed. Why do I have to do a two-person capsule orbital before I can even start research on a three-person capsule? In the original BARIS, I could open up Apollo whenever I wanted, but there were in-game strategic reasons to complete Gemini first. It was a cheaper way to build up docking reliability for example. Here the in-game reason is "but thou must".

9. Conversely, some missions seem pointless. Other than prestige, what is the point of the Project Gemini missions beyond the manned orbital? Why do I need to do an orbital rendezvous or a docking? They don't seem to affect the success of Project Apollo later, since the docking parts of Apollo missions seem driven by Apollo CM and LM reliability. I ended up doing lunar probes in my playthrough, but couldn't I have just ignored probes in favor of manned missions? I would have lost out in morale but gained financially. Another example - under what circumstances would it be advantageous to open the program that allows for lunar flyby with a Gemini capsule? I'd still have to do another lunar flyby later as part of the Gemini DA or Apollo program.

I agree with all of your points. I am trying to get a lunar landing before 1969 myself now.

I am sure the game will be tinkered with to make progression and prestige work better - it does seem to be the case you get loads of prestige, and money is the only limiting factor in the game at the moment. Also yes most of Gemini is a waste of time - I think the milestone missions need a bit of reconsideration to change that.

Overall I enjoy the game but am concerned about the degree of replayability after you have got to the moon using all three campaign options, but hopefully mix and match rocket/payloads, and events might help a lot with that. I still feel the game could still do with a bit more for the player to think about - its just a bit too easy on the player at the moment.

Some of the missions like the planetary probes are just unnecessary filling to the main gameplay of getting to the moon - I wonder how those worked in the original BARIS as I never played that game?

With an expanded timeline that encompasses 1970 and beyond, the planetary probes should not be as much of a waste of time.

In the original BARIS I would sometimes launch Venus or Mars probes if my manned program was struggling. I did that to get prestige and make up for prestige losses in the manned missions. With prestige so easy to come by right now that doesn't make sense during the race to the moon stage.

My thoughts exactly - I was just getting the hang like you but got a failure on a Apollo 7 type mission and wasted time getting the CSM running because I couldn't do shorter missions with a Saturn V to give me a chance of a less risky requalification.

I had a few thoughts like you did over Gemini - rendezvous/dock/eva were basically done as Apollo precursors but give no help/hindrance that I could see. Also the unmanned lunars were only done to aid the manned mission yet here have no effect

Otherwise it is a superb effort

Hello OutsideSubtype,

Many thanks for your feedback. I'm glad you like what you see. Many things are still in the pipeline, and everything will come together once the game gets released.

OutsiderSubtype wrote:1. Has personnel gaining skill upgrades from participating in missions been implemented? I thought this was supposed to be present in 0.7.14 but I didn't notice it in game. The only skill upgrades I saw were from advanced training.

Not yet, this task is still in the backlog.

OutsiderSubtype wrote:2. I don't understand how mission control personnel skills or astronaut skills affect the success/failure chance of a mission step. I used the most skilled personnel possible (generally higher than 90% in all mission control positions) but I'm not sure what that did exactly. The success chance bar on the right of the mission screen seemed to match the component reliability pretty tightly, so I'm not sure what the personnel skills do.

The idea is that the chance of success for every step is first computed based on the reliability of the mission components. If that fails, then the Flight Controllers kick-in and a new computation based on their abilities is made. It's like a 'saving throw' from Dungeons & Dragons. This is not clear from the UI, but at some point we'll rework the screen to make the information more transparent.

OutsiderSubtype wrote:3. I used US programs exclusively and I don't understand why I would want to mix and match US and Soviet programs in the GSA campaign. Wouldn't reliability/research carryover mean it is more advantagous to stick with one or the other?

Most of the earlier rockets have a lower max reliability value compared to the ones that came later. So the idea is that you'll need to decide whether you stick with your current technology and face the reality that the max reliability will never be higher than a certain value or invest funds in a more modern booster and eventually attain a much higher reliability value.

OutsiderSubtype wrote:4. Will it be fair that US has to research Thor/Agena, Atlas/Centaur, Atlas/Agena, Saturn I, Saturn V, etc. while the USSR can just put everything on a Proton?

We'll be adding more rockets for the Soviet campaign: R-7, N1 and the UR-700, which is used for the Soviet Direct Ascent mode. Unlike BARIS, though, we won't be providing a one to one match between the Soviet and American hardware. We are making this on purpose, since it provides much more interesting decisions.

OutsiderSubtype wrote:5. Overall, will the GSA campaign be interesting enough without an opponent? I didn't really feel any sense of urgency except when I was trying to get the lunar landing in 1969, which was a self-imposed goal.

The GSA campaign is more like a software toy. I think there's no clear answer to your question, really, it's just a matter of personal preferences. If you like testing "what-if" scenarios, you'll be at home with the GSA campaign

OutsiderSubtype wrote:6. Prestige numbers seem too high right now. I was able to get the max budget increases with no problems at all, often having many times the amount of prestige needed. Again, this might be an effect of not having an opponent who might get some milestones achieved first. Another affect of this is that the prestige granted or lost from short-term goals was meaningless. I ended up ignoring several short-term goals in my push to complete Project Apollo.

We're reworking the whole prestige system, so that it's tied to goals instead of mission configurations. The plan is also to add some "generic" goals, which will be available to both factions (e.g., "First Man in Space", "EVA", "Docking") and will grant more prestige to the nation that becomes the first to achieve them.

OutsiderSubtype wrote:7. The reliability loss from skipping a milestone (30% I think) seems too extreme in some cases. NASA never launched a manned suborbital Apollo flight IRL, but I had to in the game. I also think they skipped a manned lunar pass IRL and went straight to manned lunar orbital. That would have been suicidal in the game.

Indeed, yes, we're reworking the numbers, that will get fixed in a future update.

OutsiderSubtype wrote:8. Some required milestones seem too heavy-handed. Why do I have to do a two-person capsule orbital before I can even start research on a three-person capsule? In the original BARIS, I could open up Apollo whenever I wanted, but there were in-game strategic reasons to complete Gemini first. It was a cheaper way to build up docking reliability for example. Here the in-game reason is "but thou must".
9. Conversely, some missions seem pointless. Other than prestige, what is the point of the Project Gemini missions beyond the manned orbital? Why do I need to do an orbital rendezvous or a docking? They don't seem to affect the success of Project Apollo later, since the docking parts of Apollo missions seem driven by Apollo CM and LM reliability. I ended up doing lunar probes in my playthrough, but couldn't I have just ignored probes in favor of manned missions? I would have lost out in morale but gained financially. Another example - under what circumstances would it be advantageous to open the program that allows for lunar flyby with a Gemini capsule? I'd still have to do another lunar flyby later as part of the Gemini DA or Apollo program.

With the changes in the prestige system and the addition of generic goals, we'll be lifting the restrictions imposed in the current version. So, just like in BARIS, you'll be able to skip X-15, Mercury and Gemini and open Apollo if you want (with a strong penalization, of course). The new system will also make the decision of launching some intermediate missions a lot more relevant.

Cheers,

With regard the flight controllers stepping - when the sum of 'involvedness' in the list is <100% does that mean that there is a good chance that sometimes no 'saving throw' can be tried?

The 'involvedness' for mission components, flight controllers and flight crews (these ones are optional, though) is always 100%. That's the requirement for a mission script to be valid and we have a tool that verifies that all scripts that ship with the game adhere to that rule.

Cheers,

Hey, thanks for the detailed response. Having personnel skills act as a saving throw makes a lot of sense. A lot of the other stuff is just a matter of tweaking numbers.

With regard the flight controllers stepping - when the sum of 'involvedness' in the list is <100% does that mean that there is a good chance that sometimes no 'saving throw' can be tried?

I'll add that in fact, what you see are the 3 most involved mission controllers, but don't worry, there are a lot of others working at small and various %, especially in the most advanced programs. i.e. the Flight Surgeon rarely gets under the spotlights, but he is very often present at 5% or so (for manned missions, of course !).

The idea is to improve the interface at some point to allow you to see how much all MC are involved.