Suggestion for pool aiding

[jdorje]

My understanding is pool aiding wasn't supposed to kill cowing, it was supposed to balance it. The goal should be to make multiple strategies viable so that you have to choose between them, unlike the previous scenario where you always wanted to use pool on your biggest and unlike the current one where you always want to use pool on yourself.

Therefore my suggestions are several.


1. The tax should be variable depending on province size. For provinces at the median or above, the tax should be the maximum (call it T, currently 75%). For provinces at half the median, it should be 0. Make it linear in between. For provinces under half the median, there should be no tax. This incentivizes exploring smallies since you can aid them with no pool loss and it's cheap. And note that doubling a province from 50% the median up to the median size is going to raise the median and could still be used to make cows, hence the sliding scale. At half the median size you just end up making another median province and no tax is fine. Since you generally want t/ms around median size or above as well, that will be taxed also.

2. Make T 0.5 instead of 0.75. This makes exploring large provinces viable.

3. Aiding should be done from the explore page. There needs to be a slightly more complicated mechanic then that warns you what the tax level is for the exact province you have chosen. A confirmation dialog would be highly recommended. This is true even in the current aiding mechanism.

The value of T and the exact cutoffs for 0 and T tax could be tweaked of course, but the sliding scale system makes a lot of sense to me. It should be re-assessed each age and tweaked regardless to ultimately achieve balance between cow use and core use.

Note that a simpler system would almost serve the same purpose. You could have a kingdom pool and have explored acres count double for provinces above the median and normal for provinces under half the median, and the effect is the same. Except then there's no kingdom cooperation required and one province can steal all the pool, which is probably undesirable. So I actually do like the current system.

[JeffT]

How would you prevent the abuse of aiding acres to someone below half median in mass quantities to explore after they pass median?

Factor current acres + current prov pool into the tax formula? Or maybe have it operate like the gc tax formula where it calculates your 'max size' after the aid and uses that to determine?

[Chris121]

I like the fact that you can't realistically explore up cows at the moment. Although I do generally agree with the desire to have multiple strategies available and forcing a choice - so I am a little divided on whether I like the suggestion.

In any case, I like the part about removing or reducing tax when aiding small people and having a sliding scale downwards, although I agree with Jeff that something would need to be in place to stop people who have a lot of pool being given acres at low rates.

[jdorje]

OOW pool decays.

Pool should not be aidable above the current province size (500 province with 250 in pool => maximum 250 can be aided).

[Chris121]

Pool should not be aidable above the current province size (500 province with 250 in pool => maximum 250 can be aided).

Presumably "current prov size" will need to include acres already in exploration (if it doesn't already). And size calculation for tax purposes should include this too.

Otherwise: aid pool, send out explore to double size, immediately aid pool again.

[DavidC]

Very nice suggestion. Will need some thought to implement properly but I like the idea and thought you put into it.