Campaign progression suggestion

[ManTheMister]

What if a “budget” was implemented as part of the progression system in addition to individual part unlocks?

Each part would have a cost, and the total cost of all parts could not exceed your current max budget.

Maybe your budget continuously increases, or maybe each planet has it’s own budget. I’m in favor of the former, as it would make people have to design more drones. If there was a “star” system, then maybe there would be one star for completing the mission, one star for completing the mission under X minutes, and one for complete if the mission in under 50% of the planets max budget.

factory parts would be expensive, and maybe even multiply the cost of parts that are children of it.

[Lurkily]

A mission-based budget?  And a global multiplier that increases?  Or a global budget that continuously increases?

My thoughts back in my progression posts were to use mass as your limitation.  My thoughts were, though I may not have explained, that part count might favor certain parts too unfairly, while mass might be more easily tuned both for balanced engineering, (mass and load-balancing concerns) and as a more balanced limit on construction.

Mass is also more of a practical concern, and less artificial than a made-up credit or currency that each part 'costs'.

[ManTheMister]

But then all of the most expensive drones would have the exact same mass, which just doesn’t seem quite right. Part count is definitely not the right restriction, mass is better, but it could still be better. A variable used specifically for that purpose would be the best way.

[Lurkily]

But as you seem to indicate, wouldn't this limit vary mission-to-mission?  There might be a least restrictive mission, at the absolute limit of player progression, which might lead to the most massive ships being a certain mass, but even then you'd have a set of different drones that approach a varied set of limits, depending on the mission itself.  That, and mass is a physics constraint, which makes more sense to me than 'command units' or 'credits'.  (Of course, this is a realism concern, and realism concerns are not a realistic concern, if the alternative is more fun. )

In the end, any limit you set is going to also have an upper limit, so they'll all be at the same limit in one way or another.

I'm honestly not sure whether limiting a player's progression should be done at all.  I mean we need limits to implement progression at all, but should it have an endpoint to progression?  Part of the charm is the ridiculous lengths we get to take things to.  That's obviously something that the final game can't present at level one, but I feel like having an endpoint might not be the best idea.

All of that will depend on what endgame content looks like, though.  That will very heavily influence what kind of progression makes sense.

[ManTheMister]

Global wouldn’t actually be that bad, thinking long-term. The cost limit could increase without a limit. But that would only really work if the planets got more difficult as well.

A progression system should make the game more difficult as you progress, but also give you things that allow you to deal with the challenge.

maybe the enemies’ stats should increase for each galaxy. I’m going to make a new suggestion.