Well, the thread certainly took a change of pace from when I last posted, so first of all, in case anyone forgot, my position is this:
Whip/chop is NOT an exploit, in my opinion. Tricks against the AI like gifting gp aren't really exploits in my view either. For that matter, neither is perpetual anarchy to avoid unit striking - I've never really used this myself and it does happen to be banned in our community here, but I wouldn't call it an exploit and I give major props to whomever was ingenious enough to come up with it. I really only view true "bug" type things like units in boats razing cities as exploits.
That said, something not being an exploit doesn't mean it's not bad game design. An example of this is the Apostolic Palace system - it's just cheezy as a human player to abuse that against the AI (my personal fix would be to make civs vote by pure population weight, not "religious population").
So, as relevant to this discussion, I do have one major opinion - if (when) I could change the game mechanics, I would make all forest chops, period, a lot less lucrative. Whether it's units, wonders, etc... excessive chopping and deforestation just doesn't make sense, and leads to imbalances in starts and so on. As things stand it's necessary to compete with AI, and against other humans who do so, and it is symmetric because all players can chop, but the system itself really doesn't add much to the game - for instance, previous civ version never had forest chops count for so much, neither do various mods around here, and they all do fine. But, again, this applies across the board - so chopping for gold and chopping for axes are both overpowered, but not really exploits. Likewise, from a pure game balance sense, I would see the Protective trait improved anyway and for all civs have building wealth/research/culture a straight 2 to 1 so you wouldn't have to worry about overflow, unbuilt wonders, and the whole kit and kaboodle.
With that said, my position on the "whip/chop" is still just that it's really not that good. Slightly beneficial sometimes, mainly when you've already crashed your economy, useless in others, as Gliese says
It is nice to be able to whipchop overflow for cash if you've crashed your economy but crashing your economy is not always the optimal play.
So, in the interest of real game mechanics discussion - I would like to ask the following, which I haven't seen an answer to, especially in response to quotes like this:
But is getting 2 to 1 with something you want anyway as a byproduct necessarily worse than getting 3 to 1 on something you could care less about?
-If you're only getting 2 to 1, then why is this better than gold on an unbuilt wonder?
I know that seems a little oversimplified so I will trouble to try to present cases in depth, as I understand them. The first thing being that it IS true, isn't it, that you get 2 to 1 with everything except protective + stone, and there's no other secret bonuses out there to it.
So considering that, there are early game wonders out there which gain benefits from marble, stone, copper, gold, and ivory, which makes for a very, very good chance that you can have a bonus to one of them. Industrious civs even get a free 50% to make 2.5 to 1. The other thing is, with wonder chopping, if you really need the gold,
every forest goes directly do gold. As before, if you're building something like a barracks, in a brand new settled city, first you have to build the barracks and overflow for its cost again, and only THEN do you start getting the conversion to gold. So, in fact, whip/chop isn't even a strategy of its own, it's a hybrid between regular development, and pure chopping for gold.
Various potential uses for forests
-Non-gold based chopping: the default game. Whether you're building military, other buildings, wonders, workers, whatever, this is the baseline to compare other uses towards. Also, keep in mind that this encompasses a standard, non-REX game - you don't have to keep founding new cities to have more buildings to chop.
-Unbuilt Wonders: give a straight 2 to 1 gold if you have the resource. Every hammer goes straight into gold and you can chop at any cities you want until the wonder is built. No need to send workers to the outskirts of your empire's new cities or clear forests that the new cities may need for other buildings. Even better are National wonders like Maoi or the Epics where there is no pressure at all for timing against another civ.
Disadvantages: Gold is not immediate. So you may be waiting 5-10 turns until someone finishes the wonder.
Rating: Excellent, but not technically a guarantee since it depends on a resource rather than traits.
Protective/Stone Walls: Something is to be said that it's almost fair the protective trait has some other benefit going towards it. At any rate, this is unique among all other situations in that it does give you 3 gold to the hammer. Walls can be built in any city and they're cheap which makes it easy to get plenty of hammers into the overflow
Disadvantages: You still have the Protective trait, and walls can end up being a useless building itself.
My Rating: Good-Awesome
Aggressive Barracks: available everywhere, fairly cheap so most forests will go straight into gold.
Disadvantages: You may not want barracks everywhere. Furthermore, you're directly detracting from military production for a lot of leaders - sure, that extra gold could help you get to literature, but instead those forests could also go into more Keshik!
My Rating: Good-Excellent, with a special note for saving warmongers after they have fought into a poor situation.
Creative Theatres: Very cheap and is a building you probably want eventually anyway
Disadvantages: Later in the tech tree, so might not really matter when you need it.
Rating: Excellent, but later in the game
Creative Libraries: More expensive building, so you need at least a chop into overflow itself before you start converting to gold.
Disadvantages: You'll likely want libraries in most cities, but sometimes you might not. You might also have already wanted libraries in your capital/core cities before you are ready for the trick. Also will be more worker intensive and building a library before other buildings isn't always the best;you also won't really need the extra culture if you're already creative.
Rating: Medium-Excellent
Organized Lighthouses - cheap and early in the tech tree, one has a lot of flexibility.
Disadvantages: Not every city is coastal, and the lighthouse might not be the first building you want; also coastal cities might not have forests. But in many ways this is a very, very similar case to unbuilt Maoi - so I see no reason to call this better.
Rating: Good-Excellent
Organized Courthouse- a building you want in every city, and by itself will help your economy and expansion.
Disadvantages - quite expensive, just building the courthouse from scratch, and then requires 2 forests or a forest and a slave before you even start converting to gold. So very worker intensive.
Rating: Medium-Good
Expansive Granary-early and cheap, and a building you want in every city, so the same general advantages as a couple of others.
Disadvantages: The granary is like the #1 building you don't want to delay. Chopping before Math is a smaller return, and waiting until math for granaries is also painful. If you include whipping before you get the granary that's added inefficiency.
Rating: Medium-Excellent
Any Other buildings - unless I've missed something, forges, colisseums ect... are just too expensive to be worth the trick - they'd have a Poor rating.
Now I don't expect everyone to take these ratings at face value - but still, I think the point remains. I'm NOT saying, "don't chop forests or use them for your economy in any way." But it's not at all clear that the whip/chop is better than other uses, especially since one other common situation is often a better conversion - put as many forests as you like, no need for single turn timing and heavy worker coordination, straight into a wonder. Protective stone is clearly better because it gives a higher payoff, but everything else is situational and best, and even then it's more of a "something you can do with traits that are weaker anyway, so hardly overpowering."
Edit: Since I have the time, I might as well add a clarifying scenario here, since I realize looking back some people may miss some of the thought process and not get the idea. So, to show why if it's really necessary chopping a wonder is just as good - Consider a situation where you have a desperate need for gold, as an organized leader, and a new inland city with 8 forests.
To overflow a courthouse, you'd need the following: The equivalent of 4 forests in pure hammers, before overflow starts even turning into gold. This can be accomplished by simply building for a while, a slave as the courthouse nears completion, etc... but that takes time. But I'll grant all that for the hypothetical situation - so for this scenario I'd say that you need two forest chops just to get those base hammers, which leaves 6 remaining forests to turn into gold. To time it right, you need 7 workers to chop the forests needed for overflow on the same turn.
Now, consider simply having an unbuilt wonder (in fact, with 8 forests and the bonus you could probably actually complete any wonder you wanted, but we'll disregard that). In this case, it doesn't matter what the new city builds - let's say it just starts on a vanilla granary. Then, with just 1 or 2 workers you could go around and chop the forests into the unbuilt wonder - and all 8 of them go straight to gold. Or, the beautiful part is, there's absolutely no sunk cost - you could still put 2 forests into a courthouse right away, no worry about timing, and then 6 into the wonder as the workers get to them; you have complete freedom on what you want to turn into gold, at least as long as the number of forests isn't enough to complete the wonder. The only drawback is that you have to wait for the wonder to be completed elsewhere to actually get the gold in your treasury (which if you're building the wonder "for real" elsewhere is also an easy and common scenario). But, this situation saves so much time and effort in comparison to the overflow. And to be clear, yes, the courthouse is an expensive building so that's why it doesn't seem so good of a comparison - which I why I think the cheap buildings like walls/theatres are best for overflow, but these buildings have rather more limited uses themselves.
just bug fixing!
within five or so turns, before Writing, not to mention Currency, where upkeep is usually sth ~7gpt 
