Slitherine

If a problem with a particular system appears during a mission and is solved by mission control, it seems reasonable that the reliability of that system will increase after the fully successful mission. This is after historically why they didn't just start Apollo and the LEM in 1957, they needed to try some things out. The idea of a "test flight" was not that it'd proceed flawlessly, but that there'd be problems which they'd then sort out, thus improving the system. Currently this is abstracted by having a random improvement of reliability after each mission, but most people feel that you learn more from failures than successes. At least small failures.

At this stage, it does not appear that participating in successful missions improves 'naut morale. This seems odd, if I were the first man in space I'd be happier than if I were stuck down on the ground watching someone else go instead.

Hello KyleS,

Yes, this is good point. We'll add it to the backlog. Makes sense for the morale to go up after a successful mission.

Cheers,

While we're on the subject, it'd be nice if problems could be made less generic.

Right now, the game tells you there's a problem and which mission controllers are handling it, but it doesn't tell you what the problem IS or even which module is involved. You could do this with the initial problem pop-up or even afterwards (when the roll has been made and now the game has determined how bad the problem is), but either way it would help immersion if you could get even a sentence or two in there about what is going wrong.

Vivisector9999 wrote:While we're on the subject, it'd be nice if problems could be made less generic.

Right now, the game tells you there's a problem and which mission controllers are handling it, but it doesn't tell you what the problem IS or even which module is involved. You could do this with the initial problem pop-up or even afterwards (when the roll has been made and now the game has determined how bad the problem is), but either way it would help immersion if you could get even a sentence or two in there about what is going wrong.

Hello Vivisector,

Apologies for the late reply. Yes, the plan is to include a list of failures relevant for each mission and display that instead. It has a low priority, because we want to focus on the gameplay element first, but we're confident we'll be able to include this feature for the final release.

Cheers,

That's good news - it's promising that my wish (at least this one) was something that is already planned! And I totally understand, actual gameplay elements should come first right now.

I should say that I think you guys are doing a good job with the game so far. I finally got around to trying SPM last week... I thought "Of course, it's not done yet, so I probably won't be able to get too into it." Imagine my surprise, then, when I found it engaging enough (even with the placeholder images) to play almost up to the Apollo landing! I've been disappointed by open beta / early access type games before, but I'm definitely looking forward to the final version of SPM.