DMOC's Questions

[Iranon]

Should I be worried that I only have something useful to add on the subject of whipping?



Sometimes your marginal citizens are simply not worth the food they eat. This is especially the case in a city that is working few to no tiles (only food resources, frozen hellhole fed by sushi)
2 food feeds a fat greedy merchant.

Growing from size 5 (remember, we're considering to whip away for more so the regrowth phase we tack on is at the low end... I hope this is comprehensible), that 2 food whipped translates into 6 hammers with the Kremlin... usually more attractive than the typical specialist output.
Let the culling begin and whip as much as possible... and the larger your individual whips, the longer until stacked unhappiness will become a limiter.

 

[DMOC]

Thanks for all your answers!

Question 4: What is the decay time for units/buildings/anything, and does it scale with game speed? Also, does the decaying increase exponentially or is it a linear function? And if you know anything else about hammer decay, please tell me.


Also, why is everyone talking about the Kremlin with whipping? Isn't the Kremlin only supposed to reduce the rush buy cost?

 

[Iranon]

The Kremlin also affects whipping (but not drafting). What's better, there are no scaling issues that would require you to whip away multiples of 3 to get the full 'cost reduction', it will simply make a whip give 45 base hammers per population point instead of 30.

This makes it a wonder I want to get in almost every game, not only setting up for a total cottage spam.

 

[darreljnz]

Re Question 4: My understanding is that it starts after 10 turns and doesn't scale. Not sure about the rate of decay.

 

[DMOC]

Everything starts to decay after 10 turns? (Buildings, units?)

 

[Earthling]

No, buildings are 50, also unaffected by speed I think.

(Edit: thus I often find myself adding spare hammers at some point to a barracks or something- you can come back to it way later, but units start to decay surprisingly fast. So much that it's not good to start a unit, and then switch to something like say a wonder or settler.)

Auxiliary Question: I think I've seen it happen but I'm not sure - do things continue to decay once you go back to them, after the limit has been reached? At least I don't think you can put one turn in and reset the clock entirely. Also, does anyone still know about the land area bug on F8?

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

No, buildings are 50, also unaffected by speed I think.

This, and the number quoted for units, are both the default value, which can be modified in GlobalDefines.xml ( BUILDING_PRODUCTION_DECAY_TIME, UNIT_PRODUCTION_DECAY_TIME ).

(Edit: thus I often find myself adding spare hammers at some point to a barracks or something- you can come back to it way later, but units start to decay surprisingly fast. So much that it's not good to start a unit, and then switch to something like say a wonder or settler.)

Auxiliary Question: I think I've seen it happen but I'm not sure - do things continue to decay once you go back to them, after the limit has been reached? At least I don't think you can put one turn in and reset the clock entirely.

The item on the top of the queue at end of turn is exempt from decay. Items deeper in the queue, and items with hammers invested that are off the queue, decay. As I recall, the clock is only reset by decaying all of the hammers, or by producing the unit.

I'm not 100% certain on the latter - I remember suspecting a fencepost error if the same unit were in the queue back to back; but I don't recall the result.