That's one of the big mistakes I've been making; I didn't whip/chop at all. I didn't whip because I was paranoid about having low population cities in the early game, and I didn't chop because I was saving forests for Lumber Mills later on.
That's what I thought, and yes, that's where the problem is. To give you a short answer: Whipping early game is a good thing because any city that's settled near a strong food tile (hint:
every city wants to have a strong food tile within it's BFC, ideally within it's first ring if you're not CRE or have another means to quickly pop borders) will grow population faster than you can provide it with tiles to work, specialist slots to fill, even just
/
to keep that population working and healthy. Especially if you have a Granary, which is by far the most useful and powerful building in the game. At the same time you've got a dire need for
to build settlers, workers, infrastructure, at least
some military, etc. Whipping allows you to convert excess
into
, and if carefully done you can do so without ever feeling the
penalty from whipping too much. If you've ever seen someone settle a second city right next to their capitol and wonder why taking the capitol's food tile(s) with a second city is a good move, this is why - when one city is on the whip timer they can't regrow too quickly anyway, so having another city to grow on that food in the meantime is useful.
Chopping is in much the same boat - you're short on tiles to work and need a lot of hammers early on, so it's better to chop forests than saving them to improve later. 20
(30
with Math) and a tile to cottage/mine/farm/etc.
now is a lot more valuable than being able to build a lumbermill on that tile, what, 2-3 millennia from now. The same is true for the National Park national wonder, incidentally - being able to get a dozen-odd free specialists in a city is extremely good, but having another city that contributes to your empire for the 3-4 millennia it'll take to get there is much better.