How to use Slavery properly?

[overdose]

A friend of mine suggested that I should try Civ4 and I got addicted immediately. I haven't played any civs before and it took a few games to learn enough of the game mechanics to play "properly". I started with warlords and as my 3rd game I won by points using n00ble continents map with Stalin. Back then I had all of my workers on auto and only picked the suggested producing options.

Then I started to play vanilla with Prince, started to read this forum and tried different tactics. Monarch is challenging enough now and I started to play BtS and there's a lot of new thingies I should work on.

I've read that early whipping is the key to beat harder levels but I still haven't figured out why it's so powerful and how it should be used to maximize the effect. Since I've been too lazy to figure it out on my own (it does take some time) I decided that I should register and ask for help. My initial thoughts on whipping are that it slows the growth of the city way too much to be powerful enough (obviously it is since you guys use it, I just can't see it) to be useful.

Anyways, Civ is a great game and this is a good forum and I want to thank you guys in advance!

 

[Diamondeye]

Welcome To the FORUMS!

Ontopic, read one of the pros' guides. I learnt a lot from the slavery guide written by poster Voice of Unreason. See if you can find it, subforum to this called Strategy Articles...

 

[r_rolo1]

The best thing I can do is adress you to the Vocum Sineratio: The Whip article by VoiceOfUnreason. Explains the basic mechanics and has sugestions of how to optimize the slavery use ( aka "the whip" or )

EDIT: too late... atleatst I gave the direct link ...

 

[overdose]

Whoops I should've made better use of search. Sorry...

I guess this thread can be locked/deleted or whatever you mods prefer.

 

[JackOfClubs]

My initial thoughts on whipping are that it slows the growth of the city way too much to be powerful enough (obviously it is since you guys use it, I just can't see it) to be useful.

The trick is to whip in cities with lots of food. If you whip in a city with a surplus of 2, growth will be slow since a new population point requires 10 + N turns (where N is the current population) or 5 + 1/2N with a granary. So each pop actuall slows down the growth rate. But in a city with multiple farms and or food resources, each population actually speeds it up, since the food surplus actuall increases.

In a city with a granary, each new pop point will take only 2 turns after 5 pop. If you add a resource with 3 extra food, you will be at 1 pop/2 turns immediately. This drops down to 1 pop/turn after Biology.

Voice of Unreason explains this in much greater detail, but this is the point in a nutshell.

 

[uberfish]

Easy rule of thumb: whip in cities with plenty of excess food to regrow, and kill more than 1 population at a time.

 

[Defiance]

I believe they fixed the whip exploit.