Right now we can buy turns with bonus points. It would add to strategy diversity if we allowed people to do the opposite - to sell 1 turn and get 1 bonus point for each turn. The exchange ratio is obviously uneven, which is intentional. It should be expensive to purchase bonus points with turns.

To keep this from overpowering FSs, we would need to make purchasing turns from bonus points get put into stored turns, not turns on hand.

I think it would be more beneficial to the game as a whole to charge people money for extra points. I'm not going to speculate how that could be calculated, but in exchange for helping the game financially, players should get something and I think bonus points are a good mechanism for that.

This is a horrible suggestion.

Linking success in game to money will destroy it. Most people who would pay for patron status are already willing to do it for nothing.

I dunno, lets look at it hypothetically...
$2/month or $10/yr for i dunno.. an extra point or 2 a day for the month/year doesn't seem too radical. Anyone care to do the math on that.. would that be too much?

I don't like the idea to buy bonus points with turns. Though it might add diversity to strats, I am not convinced that I like the effect it has on the endgame when people seldomnly play turns and then would use the turns for bonus. This would be a clear advantage for people dropping their stock in time. At least it seems to me.

So military prices would go up a bit sooner than they currently do, and the large landsize very late set theo non-MBR destock would be weakened slightly. Aren't those both good things?

So if I ran an 8-day bonus-start up, I could convert 640-turns into -100% building costs? Then catch-up by land-trading with a partner? As a MBR, I could exchange 2-3 days of turns for -100% resource decay? The ability is completely overwhelming at this price point, if you had to convert 4 turns for 1 bonus point, it would keep it in proportion, but at that level, do you want to be buying bonus points?

Mehul tried having a premium service on Earth with platnium accounts. They did not significant alter the revenue of earth, only it gave him 10-15 years of removed-ad revenue up front. If you mix cash-payment bonuses in with everyone one else, they will dominate the game and drive non-paying players away. If you have a cash-payer only game (like Earth Council server was), you limit the size of the game even further. Would you pay for a top 10 finish on a server with 40 people?

Mapleson - if you get -100% building costs at the expense of 640 turns, then you'll be way way behind in bpt and land compared to everyone else, and bottomfeeding is faster than landtrading until somewhere around 20k to 40k acres (and much more turn efficient, too, since the limiting factor is targets rather than turns). Putting yourself a week behind in turns for free buildings would be very foolish. Building costs aren't really much of an issue until you get past 40k acres, and getting to 40k acres while losing a week's worth of turns, and still having time to stockpile would be a significant challenge.

A MBR would be the strategy which least needs to have -100% resource decay since their production isn't based on turn usage. Getting -100% resource decay wouldn't really affect them at all. Getting -100% expenses on them, though, that would help them.

The two methods you suggested were both methods which would be horribly inefficient. It would add a new aspect of strategy to the game, where people like you could experiment with spending all their turns on bonus points early in the game to max out building costs, only to find out, that its not as awesome as you think.

Maybe the game has changed, but you could catch up to 4-5k land if you were a week behind in Earth:2025 by land grabbing instead of mass exploring.

Sorry, you are right about resource decay being a non-factor for MBR, I confused the two somewhere along the line.

It's not a new aspect of strategy assuming people are going to try bad combinations. They were off-the-cuff remarks, not simulated strategies. I'll leave you to your suggestion.