Whipping Axemen on the Nile

[Melon Head]

I was going on a brief thread-trawl last night, and came across Blake's wonderful thread on whipping. ( http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...hreadid=152415 ) Rather than perform thread-o-mancy, I figured I'd post my question in a new thread.

Now, whipping things with 31-38 hammers left and a 25% boost to production is a very efficient way to use slavery. (ref. barracks with org. rel) And we all like to use slavery to produce us axemen early on; two population yielding two axemen? Yes please! (i.e. whipping an axeman with 4 or fewer hammers in the box, then following it up with another axeman) Or there's taking advantage of whipping overflow to speed up wonders, etc. in the same circumstances, grabbing a few hammers to speed up, say, the Oracle.

This brings me to the Pyramids. Most discussion of the wonder that I've seeen revolves around the use of representation and a S.E., but it seems to me that we can leverage the Pyramids to enhance the whipping bug and get an incredible deal. If you can snag the Pyramids (admittedly questionable), and then run Police State, you've got a 25% military unit production bonus. If you then build axemen, and whip with between 1 and 4 hammers in the bin, you can grab 60 hammers for 1 population. This could mean 2 axemen for just 1 pop point, or a basically free axeman on a building you were going to whip anyways.

Is there something about whipping that I'm missing, or should I prioritize pyramids and/or start playing Napoleon more often? (Stalin under Warlords, I suppose)

[SebP]

Under Warlords, as i understand it, the whipping bug is done with

[couerdelion]

Originally posted by SebP
Under Warlords, as i understand it, the whipping bug is done with

It went with one of the patches. Though I do miss getting 60 hammers for one unit of population, it was a bit of a cheat really.

But now the whipping gives all the bonuses for production so it's not all bad news.

[Blake]

The main thing you are missing is that a city with even a miserable food surplus like 2fpt can grow 1 pop within 10 turns. It's generally in your best interests to have a much higher food surplus - I usually aim for 5-7fpt, allowing the city to grow like 3 pop in 10 turns. As such chaining 1-pop whips will result in massive unhappiness. The 1 pop whip is still slightly useful for those poor starved cities and for cities far below the happy cap, but it's not really that useful - not worth getting the Pryamids for.

[Diadem]

What exactly is the whipping bug? And how has whipping changed now that it is solved?

[couerdelion]

Originally posted by Diadem
What exactly is the whipping bug? And how has whipping changed now that it is solved?

The whipping “bug” was the situation that gave whip benefits is lumps of 30 beakers sufficient to complete the build and this was, to a large extent, separate from the code that calculates how many population were needed.

It was very apparent on Epic speed where the whip calculation allowed for something like 44 per population point. So if you whipped with 31-44 hammers left on the build, it would calculate that you needed 1 population point but would give you 60 hammers.