Might not be - here's some vocabulary:
If we are going to compare whip production to some other alternative, then we should be doing so over some interval where the end points are equivalent. Start at condition A (food bin, happy) then T turns later arrive at condition B (food bin, happy). You want B to be the same for both alterntives, because otherwise you end up complicating the analysis with comparisons of B and B'.
If condition B is the same as condition A, then you have a cycle; and more to the point you have a sustainable cycle - you can continue doing what you did indefinitely.
T then defines the period of the cycle. With whipping, to get the happy to balance out you need the period to be at least 10 turns, but of course it could be longer.
No problems so far. I see no problem comparing cycles of different length, efficiency is about average yield.
'Grow to unhappiness, immediately whip 2 so there are no unhappy citizens at any end of turn, grow to old cap in 10 turns, cycle complete' is one cycle. It appears that you thought that I thought (...) that the first 'grow to unhappiness' was a once-off prerequisite and we'd have 10-turn cycles thereafter. I didn't.
Now, I understood you to be thinking about a two pop whip scenario where you start from a state where you have an unhappy pop. So it might be something like happy capped at 6, and you're whipping from 7 to 5 instead of from 6 to 4. So the caution I was offering is this - that in a 7->5 whip, you can't get back to size 7 in 10 turns without spending at least one turn at size 6 with only 5 happy (without resorting to crazy things like the hanging gardens). So either you are feeding an unhappy citizen at some point, or you are needing 11 or more turns to get back to condition A.
I would indeed whip from 7 to 5, but I find it easier to define 'at stable cap, just the Granary reserve in the bin' as my starting/end point for all cases. That describes a city that has just grown into its cap, and makes equal sense for stable cities and just about any sane cycle.
For an example, let's also make our job easier by bumping the happy cap to 10:
Short cycle: 9 citizens with food surplus of 2, whipping for 1 every 10 turns as we regrow and anger wears off. Almost stable, we gain 1 food each cycle.
Long cycle: We work the same 9 citizens for 10 turns, then assign the 10th citizen work a filler tile that feeds itself - grassland forest, water with a lighthouse etc. We grow to size 11 in 10 more turns, then whip for 2. Almost-stable 20-turn cycle, gaining 1 food each time.
We had the same yields from the first 9 citizens at all times, and got 60 raw hammers from whipping over a period of 20 turns. The 'short cycle' is 1
ahead, the 'long cycle' 10x the net yield of the filler tile - 10
for ocean, 10
for grassland forest, 20
for coast.
Nod bad, and often we will have better marginal tiles available.
