Starvation tip

nishant1911

nishant1911

*hugs*
Joined
Oct 17, 2009
Messages
453
starve the city working all major food tiles just before it is going to lose a pop point and after that assign all the citizens to scientists (caste system). despite the food deficit it will still lose only one pop point and you would gain a lot of gp and beakers.after losing one pop point you can again stagnate the city or grow back 1 point.

you would want to do this when-

1.in last turns of golden age.

2.you have a city in unhappiness and don't want to or there is nothing to whip and there is no way to get more happiness
or you have some major unhealthiness.

3.city has no growth potential and has national epic

now the major one
4.when you capture one of those huge pop city of AI's which have some tiles to work but are starving (unhappiness). in this condition you can either whip a theater (3 pop)
if your culture slider is really high or you can starve the city way above.

nice synergy with pacifism, philosophical and representation.

not sure if you guys already knew it, but i had to tell somebody:D.
 
In case #3, you might want to run artists rather than scientists to pop the borders and hopefully avoid another turn of starvation.
 
LuCiver said:
In case #3, you might want to run artists rather than scientists to pop the borders and hopefully avoid another turn of starvation.
Click to expand...

popping borders won't do any good because a there is high chance that city is already working all the tiles it can(culture pressure).
the only way you can work more tiles is by capturing another city.
 
It's very handy in an artist based culture game, you starve cities that can produce a great artist so they beat the heroic epic city occasionally.

I did it in my Cathy Queen of Culture game: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=294931

(post #163 onwards)
 
Haha, this "specialist starvation" is often forced on you when you capture big cities.

In essence: if you're gonna starve, food doesn't matter :D
 
When you starve, you drop a size and lose all food in the bar though. The food bar takes 20+2(size) food, your whole population requires only 2(size) to feed.

Every time you starve, you lose more than 20 food without compensation (since the home tile always produces some which won't do you any good, and you probably have a few other good tiles that have a food yield) so I'd try to avoid this if possible and crack the whip instead.

It may theoretically be worth using deliberately at massive city sizes with massive unhealthiness, but situations in which it's actually efficient would be rare and extreme.
 
Iranon said:
When you starve, you drop a size and lose all food in the bar though. The food bar takes 20+2(size) food, your whole population requires only 2(size) to feed.

Every time you starve, you lose more than 20 food without compensation (since the home tile always produces some which won't do you any good, and you probably have a few other good tiles that have a food yield) so I'd try to avoid this if possible and crack the whip instead.

It may theoretically be worth using deliberately at massive city sizes with massive unhealthiness, but situations in which it's actually efficient would be rare and extreme.
Click to expand...


There are points on both sides of the argument:

In defense of starvation, the Granary gives back half of the cost of regrowth when your city is regrowing. For example, let's assume that at the brink of starvation (0 Food in bin), we are at size N+1, and we assign all pop to specialists. On the next turn, we remain at 0 Food but our size goes down to N.

At that point, it will cost 1/2 * (N*2 + 20) food to restore the food bin to the halfway point. From there, it will cost another 1/2 * (N*2 + 20) food to restore the city size to N+1. Although it takes N*2 + 20 food to restore the city size to N+1 from 0 food, half of that food cost is recovered by the granary.

This means that there is a breakpoint at which the real cost in food, with a granary, may be 0 or less. Specifically, when the city is large enough.


On the other hand, using this trick can greatly limit your yields, if it forces you to forego using high-food tiles that would otherwise make the city very productive. For example, an irrigated corn provides 6F but would be useless in this scenario. In such a case, tiles like these are 3F more than a "normal" tile.
 
A granary doesn't help here, you start with an empty food far after starvation. If it did, this would allow some rather serious abuse.
 
Granary doesn't do anything for oscillations of one (amplitude) population point.

Granary does help if your losing and potentially regrowing more than one population though. I think this would tend to prefer the whip because those juicy new cities will starve anyway and can at least whip out some needed infastructure at the cost of multiple population before getting on the regrowth phase of the cycle.

If you need :culture: then I can see using specialist but I typically find that newly acquired cities need buildings badly and like Nishant said, capturing new cities is faster and more effective. :science: and :gold: can come from other cities.
 
Iranon said:
A granary doesn't help here, you start with an empty food far after starvation. If it did, this would allow some rather serious abuse.
Click to expand...

As much as I wish you were right, I believe that is not the case here...

Let's take a turn-by-turn example.

A city begins with 0 Food and 12 Pop on turn 0. It starves for 1 turn, bringing it down to 11 Pop and 0 Food on turn 1

Now, let's say that on turn 2, the player decides to regrow the 1 lost pop. In order to do so, it costs a total of 42 food (using the same formula you quoted earlier).

Here's the catch, though...on turn 0, we started with 0 Food. During the regrowth from 11 pop to 12 pop, although we pay the full price of 42 food to grow to 12 pop, our food bin starts from 21 food at the point that we regrow to 12 pop--resulting in 21 more food than we had on turn 0.

If you count this extra 21 food provided by the granary during regrowth from 11 to 12, it's almost equivalent (although exactly) to providing a discount on the cost of regrowth. So, although the face-value cost of regrowing from 11 to 12 was 42 food, the real cost was only 21 food because we end up with 21 more food than we had on turn 0.

Please read through this argument again and see whether you disagree...
 
I fail to see how spending 42 food to get 21 better than when you started is a good thing.
 
Let me check whether I got this right. In more general terms:

Starting from city size n+1 and no food in the bar, we starve for as much as possible.
We spend 2n+20 food to regrow from an empty bar, at whatever pace we are capable of.
We are back at size n+1 again, with n+10 food in the bar thanks to a granary.

So if our initial starvation was by more than n+10, we come out ahead?
 
Ramanag said:
I fail to see how spending 42 food to get 21 better than when you started is a good thing.
Click to expand...

It depends on the city size.

In an ordinary case, every specialist we run results in a net -2 food. But an exception happens when we begin the turn with 0 food in the food bin, because then it becomes a loss of population, rather than a loss of food.

The trick is in finding scenarios in which a -1 loss to population is less costly than a -2 * pop loss to food.


Iranon said:
Let me check whether I got this right. In more general terms:

Starting from city size n+1 and no food in the bar, we starve for as much as possible.
We spend 2n+20 food to regrow from an empty bar, at whatever pace we are capable of.
We are back at size n+1 again, with n+10 food in the bar thanks to a granary.

So if our initial starvation was by more than n+10, we come out ahead?
Click to expand...


That is the point I was getting to...it's neither a clear loss nor a clear gain. Rather, determining whether it is a loss or gain depends on our city size and the number of high-food tiles that we must forfeit in order to run specialists.
 
I still fail to see how the math could ever work out favorably for starvation.
 
Ramanag said:
I still fail to see how the math could ever work out favorably for starvation.
Click to expand...

OK, let's take the above example with 12 pop...

If we work specialists normally, say with a food bar at 40, then by running 12 specialists we have a net food of 2 - 2*12 = -22. So, we begin the next turn with the food bar at 18, since the net result of running 12 specialists equates to a loss of 22 food.

Now, the other scenario is if we begin at food 0. Again, we run 12 specialists and begin the next turn at 11 pop and 0 food. In order to recover our pop, we spend 42 surplus food within the next several turns...but 21 of that food goes to the "bank"...in other words, the Granary gives us back the 21 food once we have reached 12 pop again. In this case, the net result of running 12 specialists is -21 food, which is +1 better than the ordinary scenario.

Of course, this simplified analysis overlooks the opportunity cost of running high-food tiles like Irrigated Corn, which make it more favorable to conserve population and avoid starvation.
 
nishant1911 said:
popping borders won't do any good because a there is high chance that city is already working all the tiles it can(culture pressure).
the only way you can work more tiles is by capturing another city.
Click to expand...

If this is your situation, you are not conquering fast enough. :) I have plenty of opportunities to add tiles with a border pop, especially with the first border cities taken.
 
I may be in the minority here, but, if I have a size 12 city, it has at least one high food tile. I can see the paper working out for this, but once you add in hammer/commerce loss of one fewer pop to work tiles/specialize, it doesn't strike me as a good trade unless you built your city poorly. Captured cities who don't have their total tile set notwithstanding.
 
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