I did not even try playing FAs till I was over 100K.
I am the AM of a fellowship that just celebrated its 1st anniversary on Saturday. In our year of existence, we might have only completed maybe 5 or 6 FAs. For ease of recruiting with nothing to offer, I took in mostly new baby cities still in their freshly opened plastic wrappers. The first few FAs were one path and done since we had a skeleton crew. Then we had one or two FAs that coincided with an event that offered conversion recipes. I like to do 1 path and done with these too since I want to give my players the max time and opportunities to convert artifacts if they choose to do so. Well 2 FAs ago, I decided we're finally ready to give our first all-out FA a go. I have been running FAs for more than a year as the FA mage in other fellowships though. I pegged us to finish in the Top 15 and Top 10 if optimistic. We had about 60% participation, but we finished 5th. In the last FA, we improved to 3rd and only 3 people sat out (1 badge per stage doesn't count as participation to me). As of today, only 14/25 cities are above 100k (with #13 and #14 just barely above 100k). In the previous FA a few months ago then, it's probably very close to half the group fell below the 100k threshold. Therefore, it's not so much the size of the cities, but the size of bite!
The general consensus was that they could not make a difference so what was the point.
Participation and success begets more of the same. I've seen it happen in several different FS where I've led the FAs. Once they see they can do well, they will have the confidence to be self-motivated to try harder next time to see if we can improve even more. Now realistically speaking, we're not going to hit #2 anytime soon unless we can scrape together at least another 15k of points, which means a 90k total points effort. Even as a battle-hardened FA veteran, I know that's a BIG ask. And yet, players are already talking about what they want to try differently this time around. Facing ugly odds, you have a failure to launch scenario and I have an overly optimistic crew that thinks they're never out of the race. We might not win the next FA or the one after, but one day, we'll have our shot. Those <100k cities are gonna grow to be scary 200k cities and we know how to make do with less. Attitude is half the battle
Granted this would increase scores, but it would also players with much smaller cities to contribute to the FA.
If you're
not going for rank, there's no point in fussing over leftover badges. Do one path each stage and collect your prizes. Be done with FA early and go back to normal play. If you're trying to go for rank, I don't think a pool will really help a casual FS as much as you think. The top FA fellowships will have even more leftover badges than you can imagine. For every 100 leftover badges you have, they probably have 500+. I probably had over 1000 leftover badges. In my case it's because I know I
will be online a lot so I always let others dump first and act as the group's backup. I don't fuss over it because that is the best strategy for my group. One of the larger cities in my group had over 200 leftover statues and 180 necklaces. He stayed on the long productions knowing he didn't have time to come online and couldn't dump them. What do you think happens if a competitive FA fellowship gets access to a pool? A casual FS might jump another 5000pts but a competitive FA fellowship might jump another 20k. Then would your group really feel that much more motivated to put forth more effort if that score gap widens even more? I am doubtful.