whenever i capture an enemy city, i always whip away as much population as possible, regardless of "hammer loss". like this (on epic):

size 10 + x city comes out of revolt. i whip a courthouse on that turn for four pop, because some hammers magically appear on that first turn. then, on that same turn, i switch to a theater and whip that for, i think, three pop (two pop plus one pop penalty for having not contributed any hammers). then, if i have enough pop left, i whip a granary. or extra garrison troops. it doesn't really matter what you build, the point is to drop the pop to size 2 or 3 as soon as the city comes out of a revolt.

in my mind, this reduces the chance for city flipping, requiring fewer troops as a garrison. i'm not sure if it really works this way, it's more of a throwback to civ3.

secondly, most of the population was unhappy and unproductive anyway, but still drawing off any extra food production. because that city is going to starve off one population per turn anyway, i don't mind taking the "lost hammer" hit by whipping without at least one turn of building.

the happiness hit usually isn't a problem with a few resources. unless the city also has three food bonus tiles in the BFC, population won't overtake the happy cap. plus, you can start regrowing population at a lower total food cost per pop on the first turn.

comments? suggestions?

edit: this is really more applicable to late classical wars and later. super early wars, or wars of total domination over another civ, may find that keeping that population alive is much more beneficial

I have no problem whipping captured cities pretty brutally, even swallowing the no-hammer penalty. Like you said, if they are starving anyway who cares? I only worry about whipping away useful (non-revolting) citizens who are working bonus tiles or towns, etc.

As for culture flipping, I am not so sure. To be honest this is a part of the game that still mystifies me a bit but I don't think lower pop will help prevent flipping. You have to increase your culture vs. the enemy's culture in the city's tiles. Maybe someone else can give a more definitive answer.

Courthouse--> Theater is a good build order IMO and pretty standard for me, though I have gone with culture buildings first in certain situations.

Depends, as everything in this game.
When I kill a civilization, I rarely whip them to death (more than my regular population that is), as when they convert into whatever I am.

@andvare:

i agree, if you are able to kill the entire civ, that you should treat the pop points as your own productive citizens.

this is more about if you take 2 or 3 large cities from a larger civ than yourself that has 7or 8 cities and you started with maybe 3 or 4. i didn't specify when exactly one would do this, so i guess this is the situation i was thinking about. but the point is that you're going to leave part of the civ intact and it still has some nearby cities with lots of culture.

What version of the game are you playing zombiestomp? In bts 3.13 you no longer get a turn of work put in when a city comes out of revolt. Futurehermit brought this up in an old thread were he argued it made organized a worse trait since you had to wait an additional turn to whip a courthouse.
I use the same tactics btw, especially when the city is starving, actually I try to calculate which buildings to whip to maximize work output and minimize useless starvation death at the same time.

I do use this tactic occassionally but note that if you whip a unit or building with zero hammers invested then you only get 20 base hammers instead of the normal 30. That is a heavy loss if you whip more than once.

Also note that even if a city is starving it will only lose 1 pop per turn regardless of the food deficit, so with an empty granary -20 food is no worse than -2. It might be better to wait 1 turn for a few hammers to be invested, despite losing 1 pop from starvation, and then whip normally for 30 hammers per pop rather than whip immediately for 20 hammers.

Another point to note is that many of the causes of unhappiness are dependent on the number of pop in the city. War Weariness, Emancipation and Motherland are all size dependent. This means that whipping a city for a few pop can produce a much larger improvement in unhappiness. For instance if you have a size 13 city with 13 happiness and 17 unhappiness (giving 4 :mad:) where WW and motherland cause the problem then a whip of 3 can often reduce the size to 10 and the unhappiness to 12. So the unhappiness problems are often not quite as bad as they first appear.

There is no need to kill happy citizens if they have good tiles to work.

Flipping, nationality, and motherland :mad: in Civ4 is all based on the culture of the city tile.

And a captured city can't flip back.

@davemcw

i did not know that. mostly, my reasoning for so much whipping was to prevent city flippage.

There is an option to allow captured cities to flip back in custom games (off by default and in normal games from the "play now" menu.) However, even if they can't flip back they can go into revolt which of course is problematic.

Whipping an early culture building early is good for getting the border pop, especially if food resources are in the 2nd ring so you can stop the starvation sooner (weigh this against the options of letting religion do the first border pop or building culture given Music if you have them). However, except for cities on the outskirts of an empire or captured very early in the game, getting your nationality to a significant percentage tends to be very difficult.

And a captured city can't flip back.

Gonna have to dispute this one. I've definitely had cities flip back after I conquered them and it just happened in a recent game. I was holding a captured Dutch city, regrouping with a peace treaty. I redeclared as soon as I could and a few turns after weakening its garrison to strengthen my offensive SoD it flipped back to Willem. I find this usually only happens after at least 1, sometimes 2, revolts in the city which provide a warning, which was the case with Willem. I play custom games with no special options checked so maybe this is a default option now?

Gonna have to dispute this one. I've definitely had cities flip back after I conquered them and it just happened in a recent game. I was holding a captured Dutch city, regrouping with a peace treaty. I redeclared as soon as I could and a few turns after weakening its garrison to strengthen my offensive SoD it flipped back to Willem. I find this usually only happens after at least 1, sometimes 2, revolts in the city which provide a warning, which was the case with Willem. I play custom games with no special options checked so maybe this is a default option now?

No, captured cities can not flip back to the person you captured them from. That's why there's a custom game option to allow captured cities to flip back to the real owner.

The city CAN flip to a 3rd party that also had high culture in that city, if the city was a border city with another civ, for example.

It can flip back if you enabled the "captured cities flip after conquest" option. I always do it myself, it seems more realistic.