Is slavery whipping "gamey", or "part of the game"?

[UncleJJ]

Andy06r: Thank you! I always thought that the happy cap got lower for every whipping. What you're basicly saying is that I can farm flood plains, let the city grow as much as it can and then kill off all those angry and sick people without consequenses? Does this mean that if I build the Pyramids, adopt nationhood, build a forge and the heroic epic, I can whip at 250% = 75 hammers?

I have to start a new game and try this!

Whipping gets all the production bonusses normal hammers get. So Police State (from The Pyramids) forge and HE would give +150% and 1 pop = 75 hammers, if used for military units.

Similarly when whipping buildings the forge and OR combine to give 45 hammers per pop.

Bad Br: The consequence is that you get one additional unhappy face 10 turns after each slavery rush. If you have a fast growing city and you whip a lot this can add up. You will need a happiness buffer to do it continuously. Plus as your city gets bigger it takes more turns to add a person. The maintenence costs are high and there are other good civics in that category, so I usually move off slavery around the time I got my forges built.

Unhappiness is indeed the limitation on the frequency of whipping which is means in the long term one whip every 10 turns ... unless you're Monte with his UB which cuts the unhappiness recovery time to 5 turns. I like to have a library and later a market in a high food city so I can limit regrowth speed by using food to run specialists who in turn generate lots of beakers and gold and GPPs. That way I can wait for the whipping unhappiness to wear off. Slavery goes well with a SE and lots of farms.

It is a common myth that it takes longer to regrow a larger city. It does take a city more food to grow as it becomes larger but if the bigger city works more grassland farms (or better food resources) it actually regrows faster as it gets larger due to the increased food. The limit on growth is 1 pop per turn.

 

[Devil Inside]

Cool. Post some pics too if you're up for it

i had a funny circumstance tonight while playing that map:
i had conquered the french and victoria with little to no effort...moved south, and smoked chairman mao with my brand new riflemen stack (2 stacks of 10 with 4 cannons in each stack), whipped myself up some minimal defense for shanghai and beijing.....and proceeded to line BOTH chinese stacks against my best buddy Saladin's closest border city.

stupid me wasnt paying attention to the relations screen, and didnt notice that my arab friend had a defensive pact with isabella. well, with saladin to my west (comprising most of my western border), and isabella bordering my 2 newest vassals to the north (britain was NW and france was NE) i was infuriated by saladin's audacity at not ceding to my demands of 3 gold/turn.

i declared war. (some ally i was! ha!)

the trumpets of doom sounded twice?! my info told me that isabella had declared war on me!
quickly realizing that my new vassals would be trounced by the army to the north, i had 2 options: split my unstoppable army poised at the arab border, or whip riflemen in every city in the northern half of my empire.

remembering this thread, i went with the whipping. couple the whipping with a quick draft in all of my largest cities, i sent an even LARGER army toward the huge inland sea that divides the northern half of the continent.
using a french city as a waypoint, i proceeded to split the army in half, aiming purely to defend my #$!%ing weak assets that would most certainly be attacked.

with a bit of diplomatic flair, i was able to convince Roosevelt (probably very nearly isabella's equal in brute force as far as army size goes) to stop trading with isabella, and declare war on saladin. he was situated directly north of saladin, and a tad NW of izzy.



VOILA! the whole continent was involved in multi frontal war!

making quick work of saladin, i marched straight to mecca. he bowed before my military prowess, and decided to live to fight (my battles ) another day.
the war with Arabia took exactly 5 turns, i believe.

the war with spain would last nearly 20 turns, with the usa doing nothing offensively (i convinced him to join my "coalition of the willing"). saladin eventually sent a whole mess of camel archers north to relieve the pressure on my stream of riflemen.

utilizing the huge inland sea, i decide to stop dilly dallying around, and create a fleet of galleys in the tiny town (pop. 3 i believe) of Dover (recently liberated from the english).
when i have 3 galleys, i proceed to dump stack upon stack on the opposite shore (the heartland of spain).

meanwhile, i see that the english have begun to mount an offense of knights, so i would have to move quickly in order to ensure capitulation.

izzy's grenadiers literally POUR out of her cities.....i have a stack of about 25 riflemen sitting 2 squares away. no artillery (they werent loaded yet).
right about this time, my cossacks (Stalin is my favorite ) are pouring through the french side of the border (there were 5-6 i believe), and they laid seige to one of the smaller spanish cities...making short work of the city, i raze it, in order to give the dwinding french borders some relief.

my rifleman stack has decided to beeline straight to madrid, ignoring anything else (this is a surefire way to gain capitulation). her grenadiers NEVER ATTACK ME! they make short work of the english knights, however.

reaching the border of madrid, i take the city in a BLOODY battle that lasted 2 turns. at one point, i thought she would destroy my stack, but i was fortunate enough to have a hill to place my gentlemanly murderstack on.

capitulation followed on the next turn.

the war with america wasnt even fun. i had fighters by that time, and just bombed his defenses from the safety of my new spanish airstrips. i walked 8 infantry onto american soil, and roosevelt was all but begging me to be a part of the new russian empire.



the turn after i gained total control of MY island (yes, it is MINE ), my finances were dwindling.
i switched to universal sufferage/emancipation/free speech/state property/pacifism.
regaining my religion did wonders for my economy. demanding that my vassals follow suit, i turned my sights toward the "new world".

i certainly hope the incan empire (the largest and soon to be first target of my conquests there) develops gunpowder soon.

*edit: im going to go through the autosaves tomorrow when i wake up, and post a play by play of my game. it is probably the most fun "project game" ive had in awhile.

 

[robcheng]

So if you play on normal, you can look at the hammers you have left and divide by 30, or divide by 20 if its teh first turn, and know how many people you will need.

You can also just mouse-over the whip button and it will tell you how many people you would need to whip to finish whatever is currently in the build queue