You can only work with the tiles you have. We don't have BG tiles at the capital. We have flood plains. That means choosing food OR shields. Unless... you simply let the grow larger and keep it there, where you can get food and shields. There's just no way to get these tiles to four turns per settler. I agree with the urge to speed things up, but your whipping sped up one settler at cost to everything else.
Did it turn out that the Mongols were racing for Orange Dot? Did you three turns earlier grabbing that actually make or break the difference on us getting that location? I didn't get that sense from your report.
Settler production rate can be limited by food or by shields. In the case of lands with no food bonuses, the fastest settler rate is ten turns per settler. It takes that much food, with granary support, to grow the city two sizes. This can't be sped up no matter what. Whipping to try to do so would completely fail to recognize that it is the food, not the shields, that is limiting production.
Well, for our capital, it is the shields that is limiting, but you speak of a settler every five turns as an unacceptably low output. That would be absurd, in my view. If we had drawn lower food totals, we'd be stuck with a settler every ten turns at best, and training units in between each settler.
Fact is, we have the food and shields to put a settler out every five or six turns. That is monumentally good. It only works if we keep the city between size 4 and 7, though. Dropping it to size 2 means a delay of running four or five turns of max food and virtually no shields just to get back up to sustainable settler production of one every five turns, OR WORSE, not do that, and continue to shrink the capital even more, this with every whipping adding unhappiness that lasts an additional twenty turns, compound.
There is just no scenario in which whipping your capital comes out ahead.
As for losing light blue dot, there's no way Korea or any other AI's from other landmasses could hold those cities if we don't want them to do so. Right there on our core, with them having to ship reinforcements over by boat? We could take the cities away from them if we had to do so. Inland cities are another story. If we take on the Mongols or Germans, its a much bigger task.
I urged pink dot because of the quality of the land. You got the orange, that was a good move. You got green also, and that was very good. We're doing fine. But the land at our capital is a conglomeration. We can only sustain a high production rate at a higher population, to get both food and shields at the same time. This is very different from a low food, high shield, all grass layout where you WANT your capital sitting around at size one because you need those settlers out the door the moment the food allows it.
If I think hard, I could come up with some emergency situations where I might deem it worth it to whip the capital. Almost all of these involve countering some unexpected and dire threat. If the intent is to boost production, it is always a step backward. The capital would have produced five or six shields on its own anyway, so for fifteen or sixteen shields, you traded away ten food, PLUS the shields and food and commerce lost from working fewer tiles, PLUS the unhappiness for twenty turns, which would be tripled (not doubled) if a second whipping were done.
I never whip the capital. Even if I had all flood plains and desert I wouldn't do it. I'd get the thing up to size seven and run some desert mine tiles. For settler production, I'd run break-even or even deficit food at size seven, then max useful food to get back to size seven, then high shields again, round and round, the fastest total continuous settler output.
I realize there is a sense of urgency, to try to get something done on your turn. Everybody feels it. Ten turns go by quickly. All we can do is all we can do. You don't want to set up something big, not have time to finish it, and have someone else come along and undo all your gains. But Deity-capable SG players who've proven they can be part of winning teams... if any one player tries to do everything and win the whole game, it will likely only result in setbacks that others then have to try to undo. Sometimes the best thing you can do on your turn is to suck it up and leave the glory for the next guy. Sure, if you've got an open shot, take it. But if you don't, then pass the ball to the guy who is open. You'll get credit for the assist. If you never pass the ball and always take the shot, even if you don't have a good one, and especially if you miss a lot, you'll get credit for that too.
That you ran overtime on your turn to go get the green dot... maybe that was just confusion. I don't know. But really, you don't have to do it all. We will achieve more if we work together and trust one another. You can analyze, leave suggestions for the next player, veto choices of your predecessors. If your own results come out well enough, people won't object. If you take charge and rework what someone else was doing, then it needs to work out often enough that people continue to trust your judgement. That trust thing is a two-way street.
In fairness, though, when I made my dotmap, there was no contact with the other continents. You may be right about increased priority to light blue dot. I don't really know. I also don't tend to analyze and criticize other player's turns. I have a need to keep my mouth shut and choose my moments wisely, because if I went completely unchained, I'd nitpick and analyze everything, and the important points would be lost in the tumult. If I want my opinions to carry weight, it's up to me to make them weighty, not toss them around like rice at a wedding.
Hey, it's unusual to be sitting around waiting on Lee to have time to take a turn.
He spends all that time in hotels, he usually is on top of everything and needing to fight off boredom between those intense periods of doing his job. We all get busy sometimes, though. I hope he has a safe flight.
- Sirian
That is something I would never do. To save THREE TURNS on a settler? No settler is that urgent. That's 20g in added lux IF LUCKY, this if it costs just 1gpt to raise lux by 10%. Or... if not doing that, then keeping the capital at lower size for an extended time, which costs at least 2gpt (river tile) and at least 1 food or shield per turn, for each population reduced. If the city were sitting on size 6, it could produce 6spt (forest, mined hill, two plains, two flood plains) with 2 suplus food and 12 to 14 commerce per turn, and be done with the settler as the city goes to size 7. From size 5, whipping means the city dropped all the way down to SIZE TWO. At size two, the city is pulling in only six commerce per turn. Sheesh. The lost population will mean at least two turns delay on all later settlers anyway. 
