Avoid Growth Option, is it useless?

[Hans Lemurson]

The total production generated is the modified hammers (35) rounded up to the next multiple of 30, for 60 hammers.

The what? So that's what Zombie69 was talking about for getting 60 hammers from one population. Sounds like a bug, but one too juicy to pass up. Looks like it would be very finicky and micromanage-y to pull off easily, but cool nonetheless.

 

[Zombie69]

Forget about the bonus being reapplied to the overflow, i had that part wrong, as i noticed in my game shortly after posting that. Still, 11 food does give you 60 hammers, which with a 25% bonus equals 48 base hammers, so more than a 4 for 1 ratio and quite respectable.

 

[Zombie69]

For expensive buildings, you whip a low-cost military unit and dump the overflow into the more expensive building. This lets you whip the building piece-meal at basically the same population cost as whipping it all at once, but also gives you a bunch of free units.

Since catapults are useful for the entire game without being upgraded, I'm usually whipping them in every city as fast as the population will remain happy and dumping the overflow into buildings. A huge military will pay for itself as you can then frequently demand tribute from rich opponents to cover the upkeep.

Besides, it's not like you'll ever go to war with too many catapults on hand...

Catapults are indeed a good choice. Since they cost 40 hammers at normal speed, all you need is to build them normally for one turn, making anywhere between 2 and 9 hammers, and then you can whip them with 1 pop, getting 60 hammers, nearly 30 of which can go towards your expansive building (or wonder).

For low production cities, spearmen and axemen can make an even better choice than catapults (if you can use them), since they only cost 35 hammers, which means that if you only produce between 1 and 3 hammers doing the one turn of normal production, you'll get 5 more shields going towards overflow rather than towards the unit.

I almost always use this for rushing wonders, since this avoids the penalty for rushing wonders by working around it.

 

[cabert]

For expensive buildings, you whip a low-cost military unit and dump the overflow into the more expensive building. This lets you whip the building piece-meal at basically the same population cost as whipping it all at once, but also gives you a bunch of free units.

Since catapults are useful for the entire game without being upgraded, I'm usually whipping them in every city as fast as the population will remain happy and dumping the overflow into buildings. A huge military will pay for itself as you can then frequently demand tribute from rich opponents to cover the upkeep.

Besides, it's not like you'll ever go to war with too many catapults on hand...

good points here (and thank you zombie for the confirmation)
hadn't thought of this possibility.
So basically, in a size 2 city, you can whip 30 hammers towards a library every 5 turns, building a catapult on the way...
giving you a library after 15 turns, and 3 cats to defend it

 

[Zombie69]

Well, theoretically every 10 turns, if you take into account the time it takes for happiness to get back to normal. But you can bring happiness down a few points by rushing 3 times in 9 turns, and then wait for 21 turns so your happiness could go back up. Or maybe you meant every 5 turns because it takes the city that long to grow back the one pop? In the best case scenario, a city at pop 2 can have +6 food. With a granary, you only need 11 food to grow back, so again, theoretically you can do this every other turn until unhappiness stops you.

So best case scenario with at least +4 food (easy) and 3 extra happiness (not so easy), you can make the library in 9 turns :

1. Start a low cost unit
2. Whip the low cost unit
3. Apply overflow to library
4. Start a low cost unit
5. Whip the low cost unit
6. Apply overflow to library
7. Start a low cost unit
8. Whip the low cost unit
9. Apply overflow to library

Of course, this will cost you a lot of unhappiness. A method that would be far less unhappiness intensive, but yield fewer free hammers, would be to produce 15 to 29 hammers on the library while growing to size 4, then whip 2 pop, yielding 90 hammers, and only costing you 1 unhappiness instead of 3. In most cases, this would be the best approach for something as small as a library, and which doesn't get a penalty when pop rushing like a wonder does. An exception would be a city with the Globe Theatre, where unhappiness is not an issue and the above method is better, giving you 3 units on top of the library.

As an aside, using this method to rush the Globe Theatre itself (i.e. rushing units and using the overlflow) is a great idea because as soon as you actually finish it, all the unhappiness that it cost you will instantly disappear.

 

[cabert]

Well, theoretically every 10 turns, if you take into account the time it takes for happiness to get back to normal. But you can bring it down a few points by rushing 3 times in 8 turns, and then wait for 22 turns so your happiness could go back up. Or maybe you meant every 5 turns because it takes the city that long to grow back the one pop? In the best case scenario, a city at pop 2 can have +6 food. With a granary, you only need 11 food to grow back, so again, theoretically you can do this every other turn until unhappiness stops you.

i meant 5 turns to grow back from pop 1 to pop 2 with a +3 food (a flood plain cottage, or an unimproved food ressource), and never have more than +2 unhappiness from whipping.

I must read that pop-rush overflow thing over again. Maybe it's just a bad idea to wait 1 more turn, and maybe building a library in 9 turns is worth the +3 unhappiness for 22 turns.

 

[Zombie69]

I added a lot more information above, not realizing you had already posted a reply. Check it out to find out more.

 

[cabert]

I added a lot more information above, not realizing you had already posted a reply. Check it out to find out more.

done, reply edited
thank you for this analysis
very well described

 

[Paeanblack]

Hereditary rule solves the happiness issue in the short term by negating the whip penalty. If you aren't going to use those catapults immediately, just leave them in the city. This way you can whip as often as you want right now and just deal with the unhappiness later when you have more luxury resources and technologies to combat it.

The other thing to do is just whip a fast-growth city into permanent unhappiness by whipping every other turn and stockpiling units under Hereditary Rule. If you make one city permanently useless, but produce 50 catapults from it, letting you conquer a dozen or more cities the moment you can build courthouses, that's a good tradeoff.

 

[Zombie69]

And since whipping a catapult every other turn gives you 60 hammers with a 25% production bonus, and you only need 40 of those hammers to build the catapult, you can put the rest to good use by applying it to other types of units. No point in making any buildings (except barracks of course), since you plan for this city to be permanently unhappy and therefore useless for anything but production.

Once the city has outlived its usefulness (e.g. because you don't need anymore units and don't want to pay more unit maintenance), i suppose you could then gift it to another civ to get rid of it.

That's a pretty good plan Paeanblack, i'll try it next game if i have a chance!

 

[Lord Chambers]

Could you gift it to the civ you're about to conquer with the units? Thereby capturing it back and losing that all the whipping unhappiness?

 

[Stolen Rutters]

I just (last week) discovered the avoid growth button and found that it has it's usefulness in making the AI reshuffle the working tiles automatically (I have never turned off the city manager that I just found posted earlier in this thread), though sometimes nothing changes if there is no better alternative.

Then I discovered whipping yesterday by perusing these same posts (which is advanced as superior to using the avoid growth button). However, I still checked the avoid growth option just to see if the priorities they picked were adequate, and actuallyl stuck with the selection for a couple turns... I can see a limited use for the button, but I agree the whipping concept seems much better from a resource standpoint when taken in moderation.

On a separate note, I like that concept, gifting your horribly whipped city to a soon-to-be-dead-enemy just to wipe the frown off their faces! I think I'll try it and see how well it works!

SR,
New player less than one month, vanilla Civ4, v1.61, Prince, Terra Map