I've been spending the last week's bonus points on reducing resource decay. I'm at -12.6% owned.

Is that -12.6% reduction applied to the 0.1% decay? i.e. my decay is now 0.0874% above 2G resources? I figure this is the case but just wanna hear a confirmation as there is no literature about the game.

Where do you find out how the game calculates all of the parameters? i.e. all the formulas.

it has a direct ratio to the standard decay rate, yes.

some formulas are on the wiki, but a lot has changed since we last had active wiki editors. really just ask questions and hope someone who knows answers. the game is a lot smaller and less active than it was.

wait you been using bonus points in tournament on decay !

to each their own I guess v.v

cool tx. Looks like a rip off of points. Not worth the payoff for how much bonus points I'm spending.

No I did it I just happened to ask here. Its the same principle everywhere.

well on tournament bonus are amazing express should take tournament bonus point values at the minimum

about the resource decay / corruption bonus - it makes more sense on primary than tourney. like many other features of the game, it only yields advantage when concentrated and made part of your strat. for example, on primary, there are more than enough days that you can run the bonus to 100%, which means you can spend the last week of primary holding mega balances of cash and bushels, but still able to take turns, and for some strats, that can be amazing ...

it can kinda be done on tourney, but it is less effective because all the numbers in tourney are smaller as the set has fewer total turns, so the advantage of avoiding corruption is also smaller

Yeah... well it clearly only kicks in if you have any resources above 2G, so unless you can obtain that in the round, this will have absolutely no benefit whatsoever.

I think its a ripoff though. They should lower the cost of the decay or improve its performance. The way it is now, it takes so many bonus points and it barely puts a dent on the decay. I think spending it on turns might be more worthwhile it seems.

within tourney, i agree, turns are almost always best

I played around with a decay bonus / cash stock a few times on various servers, it seems to pay dividends on servers where you have enough time to get the decay way down and then stock. Tourney was probably the worst venue for it.

FFA and primary would be only place I play it maybe alliance if you get large enough, but on FFA i put bonus into building costs for self landtrading primary went into luck incase I ever need to missile someone with decent SDI, but booms and turns on tournament are a great bonus payout compared to any other server.

after quick calculations in primary if you get every bonus point and use them all on recourses decay is it possible to get decay over 100% like intrest in a bank? math says its possible but is it really?

i've pushed it all the way before on primary and i am pretty sure you don't get "paid" by going past 100%, but if someone else knows better, i am willing to be corrected ... might be nice to add it - i like the idea!

lol no you don't alpha is good way to find out if you ever want to see for yourself :P

but if you are at 100% decay then put into expenses that's more money in the bank :P

well, the best bet would be to sell bushels high once you hit 0% and then just stock straight cash from then on. No more 6% tax, no destocking for $34 per bushel, no more tech/bushel crash. Cash is king baybay

Until someone sees you with 10B on the books and runs bomb the banks on you. everything with risk.

Is the payoff even there for spending on resource decay? Considering the alternative.

One alternative is to use it on extra turns. That's a lot of bonus points and a lot of bonus turns.

Is it possible for you to make more cashing those turns than you do the resource decay bonus saves on the loss? In other words, resource decay bonus doesn't pay off?

Why would they do that? You're basically describing a troll then.

If you're arguing that, you're always at risk of someone messing with or trolling you anyway.

If you have no tanks they use AB on you randomly. Or they just do that randomly anyway to mess with you. Its basically the same thing.

unless you have billions upon billions upon billions of cash resource decay < turns

and with the ability to stock it up in something like bushels or oil which most netters need nowadays for destock resource decay is something of personal choice with no benefit really with alternatives available

Yeah but say 1 turn. Someone could be making $10M per turn for a big country. Are you really losing $10M per turn due to decay? If you are not then its wasted efforts. I am just trying it out but I think resource decay bonus is a total ripoff. The effect is too little and it costs way too many bonus points. They should change that.

Right now in Primary im making 229,943 bushels per turn I am loosing 230 bushels in that one turn. lets say I cash 100 turns. now I have rounding up 23,000,000 in that last turn I lost 23,000 bu in that last turn. In all the 99 turns before I lost a amount corresponding to the amount of bushels I had. In that one cashing run I could have lost a million or so bushels or at this market in primary 47M$ please keep in mind all these numbers except the very first turn are estimates. i do not fully understand the formulas governing the game this is just a crude example that decay is expensive if not taken into account.

Its just a percentage. So it compounds.

But you only need to analyze it on a per turn basis. Assuming someone has no decay bonus, the decay is 0.1% above 2G. For a big country, say specializing in cashing, you can make net $10B per turn easily.

So you need around $10 trillion dollars reserve to lose $10B per turn due to decay.

Granted, at that point with $10T, turns don't lead to any gain in stored cash. And prior to reaching $10T, you have diminishing returns due to decay. Effectively making very little $ per turn. So the analysis is a bit more involved than this because decay bonus affects accumulated cash over the long term on one hand, yet on the other someone spending bonus on turns instead get to have more turns to cash more.

The decay bonus will clearly benefit a really really long game where you can amass a huge amount of reserves. But games are not even that long, even for Primary or FFA.

It seems someone will have to run a proper simulation here to figure out which scenario is better for the server in question, either all bonus on turns or all bonus on building decay bonus. Other factors also diminish earnings over time, such as increase in military stock overtime if you have industrial complexes.

So definitely a proper simulation is in order due to multiple variables running simultaneously and the different server conditions. Ultimately there are different cost curves and at different points in time, will have different leaders for each strategy depending on the length of the game.

But anecdotally it seems decay bonus is totally not worth it as it stands. It almost seems like its better to use bonus for turns than to reduce decay as it stands. Your diminished earnings are likely insignificant and outweighed by simply having more turns to cash. Right now, it seems the decay is too ineffective and the cost to buy it is way too much. The pay off isn't there at all.

The above example is for cash. So storing food might be better because food is more condensed due to the price multiplier larger than 1 for cash, and its also still just 2G food before decay kicks in. So another thing they should change is make decay threshold for food lower and make decay threshold higher for cash.

But food loses in terms of the buy/sell spread when it comes time to spend on military at the end of the set to increase net worth. As a casher, your cash generated per turn, in food price terms, might be higher than simply being a farmer to produce the food too given the same amount of acres used. I don't know about that. So maybe that evens it out between casher vs farmer strategy. But a casher that buys food and then later sells it end of set to buy military will have the loss in the spread.




TL & DR: Someone run a simulation of a casher for different servers and compare whether spending all bonus on turns or all bonus on reducing decay is better, and then get back to us. I suspect there is a definable transition point when one strategy is better than the other, after a certain number of turns are used. What is this magic number? Are any of the servers even long enough for all bonus on reducing decay to be a leading strategy?

smallish point - the corruption doesn't kick in until you cross $2 billion (in ancient days, there was a hard $2b cash limit, corruption was added to the game to partially compensate when the hard limit was removed)

but bushel decay is always in play, that is you loose that 0.001 / turn - even if you only have 1000 bushels on hand, you still loose 1 bushel to decay, so the bonus does have a (very) small effect from the beginning, which can matter to a farmer

but no one here is arguing that the bushel decay bonus is a good choice for tourney, only that it can be used effectively on some servers by some experienced players - i don't think anyone would claim it is a viable choice for anyone but an experienced specialist with a plan

but just because it is difficult to use well doesn't imply that it needs to be changed so that it is easier to use well

10B a turn cashing! I think I just soiled my under pants!

Ok. Minus a couple orders of magnitude. Say $10M a turn, so tops out at $10B cash storage. $10B is easy to reach in a round for longer games.

If someone was Monarchy. One country focused on cashing (half enterprise half residential and buys bushel at $34). Another country only on farms. Both have the same amount of land and same amount of turns. Which country will come out on top in terms of $ (farmer cashing in bushels @$34 at the end)?

Basically does casher or farmer produce more income? Or are they balanced in terms of NW generation?

farmer in general would need bushels selling at an avg of 55 to beat a casher buying at an avg of 44

Why are farmers so popular then? Anecdotally, I think more people are farmers than cashers?

easier to run lot less time involved.