My whip broke

[Roi du Culture]

I believe this forum definetly needs a list of cheats and non-cheats. Chieftess, would you mind helping us out?

 

[Breunor]

I guess I'm in the minority, but I'm with Morchuflex on this one. It seems to me that if you aren't supposed to be able to sac half of your workers in one turn, doing it in 2 steps seems like an exploit.

I know that certain strategies are considered exploits for game-of-the-month purposes. I'm pretty sure you aren't allowed to build workers, and then pop-rush, and then restore the workers. So, I would think that a tactic disdallowed for GOTM purposes means that a lot of people view it as an exploit.

Breunor

 

[player1 fanatic]

Personaly I think of it as mechanic to protect AI from too much pop-rushing.

Remember, it has passed a lot of time since vanilla Civ3 when pop-rushing was viable strategy.

 

[Justus II]

I guess I'm in the minority, but I'm with Morchuflex on this one. It seems to me that if you aren't supposed to be able to sac half of your workers in one turn, doing it in 2 steps seems like an exploit.

I know that certain strategies are considered exploits for game-of-the-month purposes. I'm pretty sure you aren't allowed to build workers, and then pop-rush, and then restore the workers. So, I would think that a tactic disdallowed for GOTM purposes means that a lot of people view it as an exploit.

Breunor

I would certainly agree with your last statement, that something disallowed by GOTM would pretty much by definition mean that a lot of people view it as an exploit. In fact, competitions like GOTM are the one place where having a common definition of exploits is really important. However, the short-rushing tactic we've been discussing is not banned by GOTM. In fact, the first fully detailed description of how to do it was posted by Cracker when he was running the GOTM, so I'd say it is effectively encouraged by GOTM, and therefore, that as a corrallary of your statement, a lot of people do NOT view it as an exploit.

Note, I'm not trying to debate GOTM's rules, nor say they are the gold standard of exploit lists. However, they are a commonly known set on these forums, and a decent reference point. Certainly when I played GOTM regularly, I followed within their rules, and wouldn't have used short-rushing if I thought they were against the spirit or the letter of their rules.

As stated earlier, I think everyone has their own idea of what's an 'exploit' vs tactics, and if you're not playing in a competition or for comparison purposes (or in a team event like an SG), you should play the game as you enjoy it. However, the reason I jumped into this thread were some earlier statements implying short-rushing was a commonly-considered exploit, or that the majority of players considered it cheating, and I've argued all along that's simply not the case. In fact, before this thread, I can't remember seeing anyone call it an exploit.

 

[Justus II]

Personaly I think of it as mechanic to protect AI from too much pop-rushing.

Remember, it has passed a lot of time since vanilla Civ3 when pop-rushing was viable strategy.

I still think pop-rushing can be 'viable', in the right circumstances. Especially with the new Feudalism government, pop-rushing on the fringes of your empire can be quite effective at enhancing culture (temples or cheap libraries) and military (2 citizens per MDI/Longbow in an otherwise corrupt city). The negative is reduced pop growth, but under Feudalism's reverse unit support structure, you actually benefit from more smaller towns. It's especially satisfying to whip a couple citizens out of a newly captured city, in one move reducing your flip chances and creating a new MDI to fuel further advances...

I have found though that under Communism, whipping is actually less cost-effective. The greatly reduced corruption, combined with an FP (and especially with the SPHQ), means formerly corrupt cities can be productive even in a large empire, and so it's better to let all your cities grow and produce, saving whipping only for a few critical pieces of infrastructure.

 

[Sayounara]

I think if you have no shields put towards the city, the number of citizens killed doubles. (i.e., instead of it being 2, it's 4. But, once you get atleast 1 shield, it's 2).

Yeah, so you might wanna disband a cheap unit on the city square then rush.

Btw, how do you guys survive the unhappiness caused by forced hurrying? It's 20 agonizing turns of penalty.

 

[Justus II]

Depends on the situation, of course, but if you rush a temple, for example, it causes one content, which offsets the penalty. Also, if you have several luxuries connected, you can offset the unhappiness in smaller cities.