Dense Whip Strategy

[Hobbes]

I discovered something new (at least to me) and it seems to work. Like most ideas it is a combination of two ideas. I'll call it the dense whip build strategy. As most readers of this forum probably know, there seem to be two types of development strategies as mentioned above. The despotic rush where you use the whip to no small amount, and the dense build where you have a very compact dense city structure.

What I have tried works with a city located in a high food producing area. Normally you would whip your remote cities and let your capital become a production/population center. I have been playing with a limited whip to the capital strategy, because excessive use of the whip in the capital limits it's ability to expand. But with a high food production capital you use your capital to do nothing but rush settlers. After you have pushed your borders are far out as possible, you then build four cities as close as possible to you capital (on the diagonal). These cities will have low corruption and can become population/production centers and the citizens will not hold a grudge for using the whip. The capital's population is frozen by a zero growth strategy, by using the citizens as tax collectors/scientists. The capital becomes a city that only has a palace.

 

[King Gil]

I didn't like the last part of your strategy. I do use cities with large food production to create settlers and workers and others with good shields production to construct wonders and units. But as the capital have little and almost zero waste, I let it grow. In my last game (regent), with German, I was luky to have iron and coal in the samen city radius (Berlin - my capital). I constructed the Iron Works (small wonder), that increases production by 100%. After have constructed factory and Hoover Dam, the city was producting 100 shields each turn, without any waste.

 

[BillChin]

What you are missing that at one square distance there is no corruption or waste, so each of these four cities can become major production centers. Maybe with two maxed out, and two at 8 to 10 pop for tile overlap.