Questions About Cracking That Whip

[ratrangerm]

One of my biggest problems I have in playing CIV is knowing exactly when is the right time to crack the whip when completing production.

I understand certain tactics of whipping, such as waiting until one turn until completion for a military unit (so the next unit is almost always completed within one turn of the first) and understand as well that whipping in large cities you just captured to pump out a building and cut down unhappiness is also a good idea. Also, I've learned to never whip in cities of size 2.

But then I look at cities that are size 3 or 4 and want to whip buildings, but more often than not, I'm told I don't have enough population to do it. The other tricky part is keeping in mind the happiness thresholds. For example, on Prince level, default happiness is 4, which would suggest whipping at population level 4, or is it better to whip at pop level 3 so you stay below that happiness threshold.

So anyway, what are the best rules of thumb to follow when whipping under normal circumstances (as in, aside from situations such as whipping in a newly captured city).

 

[Greeneyedzombie]

I never care about the happy treshold. the moment I have enough unhappy citizen to whip a building I whip.

 

[shadow2k]

You can't whip away more than half of a city's population. So if you want to whip a library for 3 pop, you need a size 6 city.

You mention whipping one turn from completion for the overflow. I will never do that, unless it's a military emergency. The reason being that you get one unhappiness for each whip, regardless of how many people you kill in the process.

So a one pop whip gives one unhappiness for 45 hammers (epic).
A two pop gives one unhappy for 90
Three gives one unhappy for 135, etc...

The two pop + whips allow you to grow back at least one pop right away. If you whip it right before you were about to grow into unhappiness anyway, your truly using your excess food that would have just grown you into unhappiness...and turning it into food. If you do this with one pop though, you have to now stagnate growth, because you can't grow back right away.

You can still get overflow this way though, but you aren't gaining anything from overflow by putting it into another military unit anyway. Regardless, let's take a cat. 60 hammers. Put 14 hammers in, whip for two pop, 44 hammers go into overflow of another cat, and you can grow back one pop right away. Same thing with a lot of overflow, but you get more hammers for your unhappiness. This works best by putting overflow into a wonder, which you'd get a penalty for whipping.

To use overflow like that though with 2 pop or more, you need to pay attention to how much things cost, and if you're getting any production bonuses...like expansive gives you bonsues for building granaries/workers. Same thing with forges.

You really want to have granaries and a decent food surplus in any city you plan to whip much, as it helps you grow back faster. Not a big issue if you're whipping one pop, as you have to wait to grow back. But when whipping two pop or more, it's vital to get granaries in there.

 

[lilnev]

VoiceOfUnreason has written an extremely good article:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=193659

peace,
lilnev

 

[svv]

One thing that helps is to try to whip as soon as the unhappiness from the previous whip goes away. If you don't have enough pop to whip what you're building right then, consider switching to something smaller, waiting one turn, then whipping it (thus going back to what you were building before).

However, you should generally try to whip the biggest item your population will allow, since the unhappiness penalty for a 1-pop-whip is the same as for a 7-pop-whip.

 

[Polycrates]

With military units, it's far better to whip one turn away from starting the build. That way you can whip two people at once to get the unit and almost complete the next one too (or get a big head start on building whatever else). The trick is with e.g. axemen, you have to have accumulated four hammers or less on your first turn of building (on normal speed) for it to still cost two people, so there's a little bit of micromanagement involved (it's a bit easier on epic or marathon).
Whipping on the very first turn also costs two people, but there's a penalty to accumulated hammers if you do that so it's not such a hot idea.

It varies massively with the situation, but whipping down from size 5 to size 3 seems to generally work well for me for military whipping.

 

[cabert]

I second lilnev, VoU's article is the best information available out there.

To go a bit further, you need to do things with a purpose.
whipping because you read it's a good move isn't going to give you the upper hand.
I use whipping a lot for 3 reasons :
- Happiness management : whipping 2 or more pops for a happy building is a winning move
- Emergency production : hurrying catapults for my second war is a good example
- overflow production : with some queue management and applying the whip at the right times, you can have some massive overflow towards a build for which you don't even have the tech . I did a test for this, in this thread. It's a variant of "HAMMER BANKING" as described by VoU.