Rather than having it decrease the percentage you lose to corruption and food decay, have it increase the cap beyond $2 billion by say $100m each time.

If you max out decay, you can safely run turns with 20B or 30B cash on hand, and that has weakened farmers too much by making the food peak very short because people drop all their stockpile at the peak. Extending the cash cap rather than decreasing the corruption amount would still make the bonus useful, but it would prevent people from selling 10b+ worth of food at the food peak.

We need to do something to strengthen farmers, to make up for the harm that the decay bonus did to the farmer strategy by severely truncating the food peak. Altering the decay bonus is possibly one of the best ways to do this.

Do you have any evidence of this?

Most netting farmers don't sell many of their bushels once they are teched, especially as often they make enough cash to need to buy bushels of their own. Even with low food price peaks, I had a farmer do pretty well last set. Even for non-netting farmers, if the market peaks are low, less people will play farmer and more will cash and it will balance itself. I'd be curious to know how many players actually use the decay bonus in this manner.

Some people might have issues with the decay bonus, but I don't think it should be changed to strengthen the farmer.

I don't know about farmers, but the decay bonus has definitely significantly increased the power of techers who can now dump their bushels at the peak and continue teching.

Yes, the zero decay is way too powerful. The only way to counter it is with stock stealing but the admins (for many reasons, some valid and some invalid, imo) are opposed to implementing such mechanisms. As highrock noted it makes techers increasingly powerful. As Rockman noted it flattens out the food market, which hurt farmers and helps cashers.

I do sort of like Rockman's suggested mechanism of having it increase the cash you can have on hand which is unaffected by decay. I would probably prefer a mechanism where the bonus never reaches zero.

I've been saying this for a while, but for me the larger problem with the decay bonus is a game mechanism that encourages people to play with billions on hand, which increases the potential power of a suicider.

And Tertius, every other strategy buys food off public, so low food prices hurt farmer not in nominal NW but in relative NW. This is a classic mistake people make, and one give the general high quality of your posts/analysis I would think you wouldn't have=)

Highrock I disagree. The food peak is lower and earlier than before. This hurts techers, making early destock almost never worth it. So then we have a higher % of techers staying techer all set leading to an even steeper decline in tech prices in midset on...

all that said about strat balance, these things work out as the % of people playing each strat tend toward new equilbria. I think the decay bonus, all else equal, leads to an equilibria with more cashers and fewer farmers/techers for the reasons I stated above but this isn't a big deal, people will figure that out. Unless some change is really out of whack it can never "make one strat way worse" b/c of this natural correction...

That said, the real problem is what I said, a bonus that encourages incredibly risky play and imposes a negative externality on the entire community (since my country might not have 10B on hand, but might be hit after a suicider gained millions of $$ off the guy who did have 10B on hand)...

I've been playing techer for 6 straight resets and I can say for sure that the decay bonus has made techer more powerful. Food peak is lower slightly and earlier, but it doesn't matter for those who use decay because they will dump at the peak and make more money than before without the decay at a higher peak. It does also make the tech decline earlier, but not that much either since tech always declines.

Consequently, the decay bonus has made a theo destock much weaker and inferior for techers (although a lot of people haven't realized this yet). DMBR or straight demo destock now clearly outperforms a TMBR destock.

I didn't say anything about how it affects the NW. I said: "Even for non-netting farmers, if the market peaks are low, less people will play farmer and more will cash and it will balance itself." Which you then reiterated in your second post agreeing with me =P I was just making the point that there are many other ways to strengthen the farmer which are probably better than a change to the decay bonus.

However, there are other issues and arguments which could lead one to believe that there should be a change to the decay bonus, and in fact Slagpit has recently posted such in the announcements.

I wonder why now. I won last reset without putting 1 pt in decay. None of the top 4 used decay and only one was techer. You guys are blowing it out of porportion.

Actually the reset b4 was same makeup (1 techer, 2 farmer, 1 casher) in t4 also... what is the problem about decay techers exactly?

I just get the turns,