I finally bought Civ4

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by JackRudd

The trick is to realize that the anger is mostly an irrelevance; it is absorbed by the loss of population, so you don't actually lose any happiness by whipping. The unhappiness should subside by the time your city gets back to its previous size.


There's no benefit to keeping population down in and of itself. However, there is also no benefit for a city's being over its happy cap, because the extra citizens do nothing except eat at you. In practice, if you're nearing your happy cap, you're best off switching from high-food tiles to high-production or high-commerce ones, or running specialists, or whipping.


Doesn't look like it, although I can't say more without seeing the savegame. You can't normally do much whipping in small cities.

so if you're nowhere near your happiness cap (chieftain difficulty, tons of luxery resources, tons of temples and other attitude improving buildings) then whipping is actually counter productive? Is whipping only really a good idea at or above the populations where you have some extra angry populace?

[Jaybe]

Whipping is counter-productive when you are below your happiness cap only in that you will be reducing your population.

According to Blake, that should not deter you from whipping if it gets you something you need quickly, especially if you have lots of food available (because the population will quickly regained). Even if it takes 2 or 3 pop points. He advises whipping to get settlers & workers especially, since you can get all those nifty city-sites before the AI does. More applicable to higher difficulty levels, of course.

[Blake]

The reason to whip settlers and workers is that building them using the 1f to 1h conversion is just plain inefficient, for example with a granary it costs 15f to grow the 4th pop point, which when whipped yields 30h, so you get 2h for 1f, twice as good as training the worker/settler.
Now working a plains mine would also give you 2h for each 1f eaten by the pop, but by whipping you also get the unit out faster so gain a bunch of turns of new city development or terrain improvement. Mind you, without the granary, mines tend to be better - but if you don't have mines then whip away.

Basically always whip things which are "Growth Enhancing" - workers, settlers, workboats, granary, lighthouse. The sooner they get to enhancing growth, the better.

One thing to note is city management depends on food source. If you have a strong food tile like pigs then you grow faster at small population levels - that pretty much means you want to whip things asap so you can regrow as quickly as possible.
On the other hand with floodplains (or other 3f tiles) the more floodplains you work, the more quickly you grow, as such you want to keep growing until you are working all the floodplains and then "skim off the excess" with the whip, this will yield more production than killing population which could be working the floodplains.

Of course once a city gets into unhappy/unhealthy you want to always whip it, especially things which cost 3 pop (settlers are good) or things which provide happiness or health. If something provides happiness and you need the happiness - whip it. If you have no existing whip anger this even includes things like Spiritual temples, whipping for 1 pop - you get the happy hit covered by the temple +1, and you get a temple out of the deal (in 10 turns it's net gain), maybe run a priest - you might want to save the whip for something more expensive but it really is hard to go seriously wrong with whipping things which provide needed happiness.

[Geronimo]

Thanks!


(to anyone)

I guess I'll have to change my attitude towards tyranny and oppression for this incarnation of civ.


right now I'm having a lot of trouble in my cheiftain game keeping up with the AI factions in great person production. It seems like great majority of them are being born in distant lands. Should I be concerned about this? How critical is a high rate of Great Person births in this game. I'm having a lot of trouble deciding how to use them beyond the first three great prophets I used to build 3 shrines in my capitol. How do people decide whether to use the GP to gain a tech or whether to use the GP as a super specialiast or for some other specialm purpose?

Also, is there any limit to the number of super specialists that can be placed in a city?

Is there a limited number of Great Persons that can be born in a game or is there essentially an infinite pool of great persons?

On an unrelated note, What kind of national wonder pairings do people usually use?

I had forgotten about the 2 national wonder per city limit and managed to build the wonder that gives a 100% boost to GP births in my capitol without really thinking about it. This now seems incredibly stupid because once I build wallstreet there (and as a triple shrine city it simply *must* have wallstreet) I will be unable to build the ironworks there which given the benneifts of beuracracy would seem to be the only logical place for it to go.

On another unrelated note, my ivory camps around my capitol are really proving to be somethng of a food bottleneck and I really need the extra populace. If I convert those camps to farms will I lose anything so long as I'm not trading any ivory away and so long as I leave one camp intact? Do most people leave all of their ivory tiles as camps?

More questions! the variety of tile improvments combined with the vast number of tweak to those tile improvments by later techs has made it very very tough for me to decide how to work my tiles in general.

Is there some sort of decision tree people use to decide whether a tile will get a lumbermill, farm, cottage, workshop, mine, windmill, etc?

So far I've mainly been spamming farms and windmills to try to enable lots of whipping but I've already seen a few threads where people have referred to spamming farms and windmills as the logical result of various proposed adjustments to the game which strongly implies that spamming farms and windmills is *not* what players currently choose to do as a strategy for tile improvements in the games current form.

Thanks again for all the insight you all have offered so far!

[Arrian]

Every time Blake makes a long post about poprushing, I learn something. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that I remember something he probably already said, but this time it makes an impression.

The "whip @ low pop if you have 1-2 strong food resources & not much else" thing, for instance. I knew about floodplains sites... those I think I'm close to playing optimally. But I tend to always grow to happy cap +1 before whipping anything, regardless of the terrain.

Thanks, Blake.

-Arrian

[Kuciwalker]

Every time Blake makes a long post about poprushing, I learn something. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that I remember something he probably already said, but this time it makes an impression.

The "whip @ low pop if you have 1-2 strong food resources & not much else" thing, for instance. I knew about floodplains sites... those I think I'm close to playing optimally. But I tend to always grow to happy cap +1 before whipping anything, regardless of the terrain.

Thanks, Blake.

-Arrian

QFT. I never whipped very much before, but ever since the whole emphasis on it in the AI thread I've started doing it a bunch and my production has skyrocketed.

Blake

[Jaybe]

Originally posted by Geronimo
right now I'm having a lot of trouble in my cheiftain game keeping up with the AI factions in great person production. It seems like great majority of them are being born in distant lands. Should I be concerned about this? How critical is a high rate of Great Person births in this game. I'm having a lot of trouble deciding how to use them beyond the first three great prophets I used to build 3 shrines in my capitol. How do people decide whether to use the GP to gain a tech or whether to use the GP as a super specialiast or for some other specialm purpose?

Don't worry about it, though it may be good to try to compete just for the experience, but note: (1) Those GP are coming from among all of the AI; (2) the AI are GP happy, and use them to make up for AI ineptitude; (3) philosophical leaders get +100% GP birth rate.

Also, is there any limit to the number of super specialists that can be placed in a city?

Is there a limited number of Great Persons that can be born in a game or is there essentially an infinite pool of great persons?

No limits; no limits.

On an unrelated note, What kind of national wonder pairings do people usually use?

I've become more flexible recently (I didn't even stay in beauracracy this game!!), so others can definitely take this one on.

On another unrelated note, my ivory camps around my capitol are really proving to be somethng of a food bottleneck and I really need the extra populace. If I convert those camps to farms will I lose anything so long as I'm not trading any ivory away and so long as I leave one camp intact? Do most people leave all of their ivory tiles as camps?

Some will not develop all of each resource, though I always have until my current game. I need to irrigate a couple of silk.

Is there some sort of decision tree people use to decide whether a tile will get a lumbermill, farm, cottage, workshop, mine, windmill, etc?

So far I've mainly been spamming farms and windmills to try to enable lots of whipping ...

Will you ALWAYS use slavery? Will you change your improvements to more-hammer types if you switch?

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Jaybe
Will you ALWAYS use slavery? Will you change your improvements to more-hammer types if you switch?

good question! I honestly don't know. Blake was having such dramatic results with his whip-frenzied AIs that I just assumed that it was the be all and end all for that line of civics.

[Jaybe]

Blake has improved slavery utilization immensely, for both the AI and players (through such posts as the above, which I archive and print out), but the other 3 labor civics have uses. If you've got the gold and universal suffrage, you don't need to whip. If you're on a huge map with several AI using Emancipation you could be one unhappy fellow if you stick to slavery!

There is a time for slavery, and there is a time to free the slaves. Whether you are a pioneer or wait until the penalties start making things rough ...

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Jaybe
Blake has improved slavery utilization immensely, for both the AI and players (through such posts as the above, which I archive and print out), but the other 3 labor civics have uses. If you've got the gold and universal suffrage, you don't need to whip. If you're on a huge map with several AI using Emancipation you could be one unhappy fellow if you stick to slavery!

There is a time for slavery, and there is a time to free the slaves. Whether you are a pioneer or wait until the penalties start making things rough ...

meh, in that case I'll just have to convert some windmills to mines and i'll be able to stiwtch fairly easily I'd think.

[zeace]

I tend to crack the whip any time I see citizens working unimproved tiles. Usually this means they're working a grass/forest for 2f/1h, with both food feeding the citizen leaving +1h per turn. Converting +1hpt into 30h is usually a good deal even ignoring the happy cap. If a city would otherwise reach it's happy cap in X turns, then the +1hpt is only for those X turns, making it an even better deal.

As my workers get around to making more improved tiles there's less chance of working unimproved tiles, but still some chance. If I'm a spiritual civ, I'll often switch back to slavery for a few turns and whip-off all the forest workers before returning to caste or serfdom. Until lumber mills those workers are far more productive under the whip

The other way to deal with useless forest workers is to make them into specialists, which is often a better use of them, especially in cities where the GPP are likely to be turned into GPs. But in smaller towns that will never produce a GP, the specialist may as well not make GPP, making it a far less good use of population. eg. -2f,+1h,+3g per turn. This is probably less good than just working the forest. Even adding a representation bonus of +3 beakers per turn still leaves this fairly weak. I'll generally continue whipping until I get lumber mills.

[Geronimo]

Isn't there a tech that allows for planting forests? I scanned the tech tree for it and coulnd't find anything.

I guess I shouldn't have gone so chop happy in the ancient era

[Jaybe]

Forests grow on there own in an unimproved tile adjacent to an existing forest (may grow on roaded/railed tiles). No planting on your part (that was Civ3). If you were chop-happy to clear them yourself, you can go without them.
Build workshops (-1 food) when you switch to State Property (communism, +1 food for workshops & watermills).

Or irrigate them all and use the whip (I'm kidding!)

[popejubal]

Or irrigate them all and use the whip (I'm kidding!)

I picked up a fopreign capitol that had mostly grasslands, a grassland hill or two and 4 (FOUR!) clams.

I'm not sure why, but the Vikings had built no cottages there, so I just left it as all Farms + Clams, built the Globe Theatre there and now I whip every other turn to churn out massive numbers of excellent troops (Barracks + Great General settled in the city).

Slavery 4 teh win!

[Geronimo]

Are mountains utterly impossible to obtain resources from in this incarnation of civ?

I'm a bit surprised that you can't move through them, build anything on them, or work them. That seems a bit harsh. It ends up effectively cutting a huge number of black holes in the map that simply waste space.

Perhaps a later technology allows some exploitation of these squares?