unhappyness, slave rushing, and halt growth

[lordmacroer]

-should i be afraid of letting my city go over the content citizen limit , and use halt growth if i absolutly cannot prevent the city from growing past its limit?

-can somebody explain how it is possible to whip away unhappyness? When you make slaves in a city, the population goes down but the limit goes up, so its like you have the same problem as before only your city is smaller.

i figure all of these questions would work into each other so a short explination woudl be nice.

 

[Yudishtira]

-can somebody explain how it is possible to whip away unhappyness? When you make slaves in a city, the population goes down but the limit goes up, so its like you have the same problem as before only your city is smaller.

This is very simple, because you can whip away two population at once. If you were one over the happy cap, you are now on it: minus two for reduced pop, plus one for whipping.

I do worry about exceeding the happy cap - certainly more than the health cap obviously. Unless you have some prospect of happiness catching up, it's clearly a waste of food.

I don't know how limit growth works - if it just makes the new pop point go away, it's worse than exceeding the cap.

 

[NetGear]

you can use halt growth, but id rather manually make food neutral by tile swapping myself or pump some worker/settler in the mean time, which you'll need anyway. happiness management never really ends but you only need to really get over the beginning hurdle where you're still acquiring resource/civics and id rather not forget to uncheck the damn thing like ive done a many times.

you should be afraid. if its unavoidable its unavoidable. but that population is literally doing nothing and still eating 2f each turn. And in the earlier turns when you use food to do virtually everything, its a big waste.

 

[Celebithil]

Halt growth will just stall your city at full food bar. As soon as you remove it you will grow the next turn (even if you do not have surplus food/turn). The unhappy citizen will

- eat 2 food/turn (but hey, you had useless excess food, so this is usually not a big deal. Notice that the city can start starving if you only had 1 excess food, thus killing this unhappy citizen. The annoying thing is that it will subsequently take a long time for the city to regrow, which might mean that you can't use this extra guy if you increase the happy cap in the mean time)

- be available for whipping, both by increasing the maximum number of citizens possible to whip at once, as by being the first guy to get the axe when you do whip.

- Increase city maintenance (it scales lightly with city size)

- Increase trade route yield (both to and from the city; only relevant if the cities population is above 10). This difference is generally less than the difference in maintenance mentioned earlier.

- I believe this unhappy citizen won't eat food when building settlers/workers, but I'm not 100% sure.

In general, unless you are whipping, the unhappy guy is a negative, but only a small negative which takes too much micro to get rid of. The cost of forgetting to remove the "avoid growth" button for just 1 turn after increasing the happy cap is much larger. Also having a few spare unhappy citizens allows you to increase the happy cap by more than 1 and immediately use both new citizens.

The best option is usually swapping tiles thinking "food is worthless, I better work that ocean tile than the bananas", but if you have extra food even when you work the tiles providing most hammers/commerce, than I would not advocate for using "halt growth" unless you really micro-manage everything.

 

[Bob The Average]

Learning how to use a whip economy in the early game really improved my game play. Once I got past the emotional attachment of beelining to big pretty cities I realized what the whip can do for me.

Most cities will have two or three very productive tiles and a bunch of mediocre ones. Whipping turns food into hammers at a time when food is much easier to get than hammers. The conversion ratio for food to hammers is 1:1. Whipping repeatedly makes the most sense in a city with a low happy cap where the food heavy tiles are better than the hammer tiles. For example a city with access to shoreline fish and crabs and plain/hill/mines makes good sense to whip.

- Increase city maintenance (it scales lightly with city size)

I think this is false.

 

[Gr8scott]

The conversion ratio for food to hammers is 1:1.

With a granary, the ratio is more like 1:2 or even better. Also note, the hammers created are "pre-multipliers" meaning that traits, civics, buildings etc are applied on top.

Proper whipping is a huge boost and worth the time to figure out.

 

[rfcfanatic]

If proper whipping is a huge boost then improper whipping can do a lot of harm. That's why slavery is risky business.

 

[ben-jammin]

I think this is false.

City size has an effect on civic upkeep. It won't show up in your city maintenance, but it's there. Obviously its effects are much more obvious when you are running high upkeep civics.