Playing Brennus: Some thoughts on Strategy

[dregor]

You keep the free promotion.

[joncnunn]

In my recent game as Brennus, I got a map with no health resources that benifit from graneries, two fish type resources (with several non coastal cities), only one resources that benfit from groceries.
Instead, I got a lot of resources that need super markets plus lots and lots of happyiness resources.

[Blake]

When you have an overabundance of happiness, you should make abundant use of the whip . Get granaries ASAP and simply whip out workers and settlers and stuff like mad. A strong happy start is VERY strong with proper whip abuse.

So remember, you can grow up to the happy cap, or you can bring the happy cap down to the healthy cap .

[couerdelion]

I’d rather have happiness than grain resources. Give me pigs, fish, and sheep with gold and ivory and I’ll be happy enough to get going. I had to “struggle” through a start with fish, corn, clams and horses in the capital with pigs, wheat in city two. If you whip a settler out of the second city, you cannot grow back to size 3 until the whip unhappiness has worn off.

Cities 5, 6 and 7 (the last a barbarian city) were the ones that brought me the happiness resources (ivory, gems and spices are all that the continent has to offer) and until I managed to put a camp over the ivory there was little my high food cities could do apart from build more workers. I’d have been happy to give up both corn and wheat just so that I could have some gold.

High food and low happiness can be a bit of a struggle to escape from.

[zeace]

I've found that sometimes it's best to ignore the unhappiness and high food. Remember that while each unhappy pop contributes nothing and eats two food, they generally don't have any ill effect on the productive workers. Rather than building workers or settlers to keep the city from growing unhappy, just let the unhappy souls collect.

Then when the next new building comes along you can whip off half a dozen of them for the cost just making a single additional unhappy citizen.

There are a few happiness penalties that scale with city size so you can't always say that a new citizen will only make himself unhappy. But I'd rather have all that production-in-wait than too many workers.

[couerdelion]

Well I agree you are right that it is stored production but actually there is no real harm in throwing out a few extra settlers and workers. In this case, there were large tracts of jungle that would need chopping so it would be difficult for them to be unemployed.

However it might be the case that the quickest way to get a worker or settler would have been to let the cities grow to size 4 or 6 and simply whip them out. With a granary, lighthouse, fish, clam and corn (and size 3 cap), the city has +13 food so grows from size 3 to 6 in 7 turns on Epic speed. Two turns growth and a settler can be whipped out for a total of 10 turns. The same time would be needed to build the settler without whipping but there would be no carried forward production.

It seems that the growth into unhappiness and whipping workers/settlers would be at least as effective as stopping growth by building them.