Originally Posted by
KelpKris
I think you guys just start to circulate the food (read: buy back your own food from the market) from time to time, or at least this would save you some cash when done correctly.
Right now the problem lies in the number of players, there aren't enough farmers (most of the sets) for decent stocking. Food price hits 100 too soon. This creates this awkward situation where farmers themselves buy off all the available food.
It made me wonder how much food/cash does a farmer lose then? So I looked at the losses of a top farmer (in both cases it was Salabanzi):
Jan 2011 SaLaBaNz1(#57) [CR] 40.916 $371.814.680
May 2011 SaLaBaNz1(#63) [CR] 28.189 $244.536.451
Now I'm not going to lay down you the numbers just yet, because I'm interested to know how much food/cash do you people think he lost in those 2 sets? To make the guessing a bit easier I can tell that he most likely was somewhat more active in January set, because the cash/food combined had about the same value what he lost in May set. Most of the losses in January set came from cash and in May set from food.
This bank size talk reminds me Domination, where we had only 20G bank! There were 2 ways to compensate this: different land grab formula that made easier for stockers to keep their land + taking goods back from market was free, but you couldn't do it before 24h.
Basically I don't mind making changes in bank size limit, because it's probably the easiest solution if you want to give a score boost to stocking farmers, but there are others who can benefit from it as well, like top state who has say 450-500G on hand (you can also guess where did I come up with this number). Combine increased bank limit with premium account (money from sold goods ends up directly in bank) and in the end of the set you should be able to see the results. However BeeNo has a good point - are (stocking) farmers underpowered compared to others and do they need boost? In the end I think it comes down to how much time does one have to invest (on average) in order to get a certain score.
Lastly, I believe you actually can save some money if you would keep your extra cash in army (that is, if there is anything to buy), especially when your nations tax is 0%.