If you are not allow to build certain buidings...

[DrakenKin]

I thought at first that I would eliminate the "library, market, bank." but then I remembered how many important things they are prerequisites to. So I'd say eliminating the "courthouse, forge, barracks" is the lesser evil.

Whipping with a granary isn't as amazing as people think, and my focus is on those those heavy micromanagement, heavy calculations benefits for a minor benefit (often it works about to be <2 hammers per turn).

Maybe 1 hammer per turn is a benefit, but it is not the only one. Don't forget you get also the benefit of whatever you whipped!

If you whip a forge, you get the extra production. Assuming your city has even 4 hammers, you get a second bonus hammer on top of the "benefit" hammer + increased happiness. If you whip a library, you get the extra research and culture that much sooner. If you whip a settler you get all the benefits of an extra city x turns sooner + your own city will grow faster (since a settler halts growth). Etc.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

You'll get more production by running forest tiles than whipping without a granary. You won't even make up the production lost due to having one less workable tile due to unhappiness.

I can't believe this is an issue. You could grow twice as fast, thereby working a little less than twice the number of tiles in the short run, or you could get a 25% bonus, which is further reduced by your slider ratio. And doesn't affect hammers. And the granary is cheaper.

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There's only way to settle this definitively. We need to have a contest where people choose one of the options, and tries to win from the same map, a la the legendary Madscientist vs DaveMcW battle, where DaveMcW ended all controversy. With one hand he showed the superiority of cottages, with the other he offer an olive branch to his vanquished foes, offering them a place in his kingdom as "hybrids" and commanding his supporters not to discriminate.

I don't recall madscientist ever contending directly with DaveMCW on the same map...did you possibly me the "food economy test" thread by obsolete where both players were forced to 8 cities on immortal? There was more strategic variance in that game than just tile improvements at play though...dave choke/cat rushed to get some of his 8 cities, but got locked in an early war that took time. I'm not sure that obs got into that fight, but he also did not have to rely on a choke kill with the quecha. These things skew the tile improvement issue quite a bit.

Though the absolute yield of a town does tend to trump specs.

 

[mirthadir]

I agree. My point was trying to go in this direction. Whipping with a granary isn't as amazing as people think, and my focus is on those those heavy micromanagement, heavy calculations benefits for a minor benefit (often it works about to be <2 hammers per turn). Whipping without a granary is even worse and can't even earn back that small benefit.

If you don't have a granary, instead of whipping try mines, forested hills/-1F+2H workshops, you'll get more hammers in the long run.

Whipping allows you to convert high yield tiles into high yield tiles. Working a 6 tile beats any other option silly. It is pretty rare in the early game to have anywhere near as many as food to trade out evenly. One of the massive benefits of the whip is that you get to work inherently stronger tiles for more gain.

Mirthadir, no I did not know exactly how the whip advocates ran their whip cycles. However, the level of micromanagement involved in maximising that strategy, heck even the little bit that you explained in your post, would drive me batty. I play Civ to have fun. I've already played and gotten done playing a game where I was the type of micromanagement pay attention to tenth of percent increases in efficiency to maximise my playstyle to the nth degree. I'm not interested in being that person any more.

I'm certainly not interested in playing Civ at a level which requires the player to engage in such strategies in order to have a prayer of survival. Which is going to probably limit me to monarch level, at best.

And for the record, I am not saying, and have never said, that the granary isn't a great building. It most certainly is. If I have somehow given people the impression that I think granaries suck, please allow me to state for the record that I don't think they suck. They are one of the first 2 or 3 buildings any new city of mine builds, unless it's already there upon capture. The other buildings that vie for that honor in my games are libraries, monuments (prior to religion or being able to build culture), and courthouses. If I had to pick the single most important building from that list of 4, I would say the library is the most important. Fairly cheap, does a monument's job of pushing culture at twice the rate, boosts science output, and most importantly, allows you to run a pair of science specs no matter what civics you are running allowing a person to continue teching while recovering from overexpansion economy crashes in addition to simultaneously generating those all-important great scientist points for tech bulbing.

I've won the game on immort without ever building a lib (Giggles with an EE), I've never done the same without a grainery. At the end of the day, even if we ignore the whip - so those huge food combo tiles (like corn/fish) do nothing for you most of the early game - then we still run into the problem of actually growing up to pop 10-25. Losing some multipliers on a higher base is better than losing much of the base with higher multipliers.

Once we look at the health benefit of the grainery, I just don't see how you can rank anything else close to it for the #1 building. I get more people working tiles, I get more whip production if I whip, and I get more health.

Whipping without a grainery is pretty much a no-go without extremely strong tiles (e.g. in the cap) or extremely high yields (e.g. getting out that monument ASAP).

At the end of the day I can see several strategies that involve zero use of markets, libs, and banks; with the loss of the markets/banks being far worse than losing the libs. It may be suboptimal in most cases to go without libs, markets, and banks, but it can be done and eventually you can get a perfectly efficient economy without them. I can't see any way to counteract losing a grainery - you just get to suck it up.