Whipping + Granaries

[Ibian]

There are only so many 3pops available. Sometimes you want something else. Its more realistic to look at 1-2 pops for typical examples.

 

[vale]

This strengthens the argument for grassland forests and plains farms..

Way to cherry pick a situation there.

One single solitary food source and it is the WORST possible food source you can have, only providing +2F (why you are insisting on talking about the base tile value when there is a cost to working the tile goes way beyond me).

Not to mention the fact that your workers have neglected to do anything to improve the food situation around the city other than irrigate the rice. Umm ok, it would be nice to hear an explanation about how that happened.

Not to mention your choice to do a 3 pop whip, which in terms of repeatability is almost exclusive to whipping Settlers early game. So you aren't going to have every city you own doing repeated 3 pop whips unless you like dying to exponential city cost. Not to mention, that it isn't even clear that you will get the happy cap to 6 in all your cities that early (capital is most likely target). And also not to mention, that to actually do a Settler 3 pop whip, that will require you lose at least one turn of growth to get the Settler whip ready which messes up the timing of the growth in this extremely food poor city. So we really are talking about unrepeatable whips here.

So yes.

In that specific city, with that specific happy cap, and your very specific desire to do repeated 3 pop whips in that city for whatever reason you HAVE to work the forest tiles just to regrow the population.

Is it optimal for production?

Well. How many hammers do you generate? 90 from the whip, and I'll assume you started at 31/32 food from the first turn and thus worked as many tiles as possible over the regrowth. So you had the center tile and 2 forests for 10.5 turns (31.5 hammers), a fourth forest for 9.5 turns (9.5 hammers), a fifth forest for 7.5 turns (7.5 hammers) and a 6th forest for 3.5 turns (3.5 hammers). All told that is 90+31.5+9.5+7.5+3.5 = 142 hammers over 10.5 turns which is ~13.5 hammers a turn. Congratulations? That sucks?

How about you just stagnate and work the rice farm, 4 grassland hills mines and 1 grassland forest for lets see 1(center tile) + 1(forest)+4(3)grassland hills = 14 hammers a turn? Or even better since the happy cap is apparently at 7 since none of your turns at population 6 with whip anger had an unhappy citizen, spend one turn growing to population 7 by working a forest instead of a mine (12 hammers for that turn) before stagnating with the mines at population 7 (15 hammers per turn). After 10.5 turns you will have 154.5 hammers which is out stripping your forest whip option by a pretty significant margin plus ends with slightly more food stored than the whip option.

Try it with 2 +3 food sources and whipping starts to look a lot better. Hint: the grassland forests won't get any better when you have more + food.

 

[JujuLautre]

I'll assume you started at 31/32 hammers from the first turn

I think you mean food here, not hammers ?

You're way too kind here vale, 'coz if the granary was just half full, it would be worse, with 134 hammers over 11 turns, a mere 12h/t

 

[vale]

Yes I did mean food. Fixed to reflect that.

I actually get 132.5 hammers over 10.5 turns which is ~12.6 hammers per turn when you start at the point of just having grown to population 6. But that also hurts the grow to population 7 and stagnate plan because you need more turns to actually get there which means lots of turns of working junky forests. Of course once the city that stagnates gets to population 7 its output destroys the whipper.

And I think it is fair to start the city at 31/32 food since any whipper worth his salt is going to be actively pursuing plans that whip when the food bar is almost full to minimize lost tile turns which are a big factor here.

 

[JujuLautre]

And I think it is fair to start the city at 31/32 food since any whipper worth his salt is going to be actively pursuing plans that whip when the food bar is almost full to minimize lost tile turns which are a big factor here.

Fair enough (11 char!)

 

[Artichoker]

Way to cherry pick a situation there.

One single solitary food source and it is the WORST possible food source you can have, only providing +2F (why you are insisting on talking about the base tile value when there is a cost to working the tile goes way beyond me).

Not all city sites are spectacular. Those lucky to have multiple food resources, irragated grasslands, or flood plains are much harder to find.

Not to mention the fact that your workers have neglected to do anything to improve the food situation around the city other than irrigate the rice. Umm ok, it would be nice to hear an explanation about how that happened.

The first argument for grassland forests are that worker turns are limited, but needs for tile improvements are nearly endless. Workers can move around between cities and build roads for better transportation. They can also build cottages in cities that would specialize in commerce, or farms in cities that are endowed with abundant irrigation.

Another thing workers are good at are chopping. Grassland forests are only one kind. Plains forests tend to be abundant. For grassland forests, there are irrigated and non-irrigated, after the forest is chopped. It can be assumed that the grassland forests are not irrigated, otherwise they would be chopped to build farms.

The second argument is that grasslands, among all the tile types, are among the best. Before chain irrigation, irrigated grasslands are scarce. But then there are also plains. Those plains which can be irrigated without chain irrigation will be next to a river, so they benefit from +1 commerce. So plains farms can replace grassland forests, but with an extra +1 commerce.

Not to mention your choice to do a 3 pop whip, which in terms of repeatability is almost exclusive to whipping Settlers early game. So you aren't going to have every city you own doing repeated 3 pop whips unless you like dying to exponential city cost. Not to mention, that it isn't even clear that you will get the happy cap to 6 in all your cities that early (capital is most likely target). And also not to mention, that to actually do a Settler 3 pop whip, that will require you lose at least one turn of growth to get the Settler whip ready which messes up the timing of the growth in this extremely food poor city. So we really are talking about unrepeatable whips here.

So yes.

In that specific city, with that specific happy cap, and your very specific desire to do repeated 3 pop whips in that city for whatever reason you HAVE to work the forest tiles just to regrow the population.

Is it optimal for production?

Well. How many hammers do you generate? 90 from the whip, and I'll assume you started at 31/32 food from the first turn and thus worked as many tiles as possible over the regrowth. So you had the center tile and 2 forests for 10.5 turns (31.5 hammers), a fourth forest for 9.5 turns (9.5 hammers), a fifth forest for 7.5 turns (7.5 hammers) and a 6th forest for 3.5 turns (3.5 hammers). All told that is 90+31.5+9.5+7.5+3.5 = 142 hammers over 10.5 turns which is ~13.5 hammers a turn. Congratulations? That sucks?

How about you just stagnate and work the rice farm, 4 grassland hills mines and 1 grassland forest for lets see 1(center tile) + 1(forest)+4(3)grassland hills = 14 hammers a turn? Or even better since the happy cap is apparently at 7 since none of your turns at population 6 with whip anger had an unhappy citizen, spend one turn growing to population 7 by working a forest instead of a mine (12 hammers for that turn) before stagnating with the mines at population 7 (15 hammers per turn). After 10.5 turns you will have 154.5 hammers which is out stripping your forest whip option by a pretty significant margin plus ends with slightly more food stored than the whip option.

The fact that the grassland forest configuration required only 1 improved tile, versus the 5 improved tiles in the grassland hills example, but still produced a hammer output per turn that was within 9% of the grassland hills city (at size 7), show a great potential in savings of worker turns to build the improvements themselves.

As stated above, the saved worker turns could then be used to make other improvements where needed.

Try it with 2 +3 food sources and whipping starts to look a lot better. Hint: the grassland forests won't get any better when you have more + food.

There's always HR to improve happiness, once you get access to it. The same argument of saved worker turns applies to the grassland forest city.

 

[vale]

First of all. Saved worker turns? If you aren't building (or stealing) enough workers to minimize turns spent on unimproved tiles, then the very first thing done out of this city at population 6 with 1 improved tile is to whip a worker or two.

Second of all, you may produce only 9% fewer hammers than a city with improved tiles, but here is the huge difference: When you are doing the whipping grassland forests thing with a 3 pop whip, you are guaranteeing that more than 90 of your hammers over the 10.5 turns are NOT military or even a barracks. So I dunno, I think there is a problem there, especially since this city seems to be being built up as some sort of production city seeing as how you aren't working cottages or even a single tile outside of the center that produces 1 commerce. And your original argument wasn't that grassland forests weren't much worse than grassland hills, it was that they were better. Which they are not except under very special circumstances.

Workers are fine for chopping. Thats great. Chop out a monument and a granary early on. Perfect, I totally agree with that decision. Two critical buildings out of the way that speed the ability of the city to become productive. After that though, shouldn't you be improving the tiles near it so its growth into productivity is actually productive? At some point this early settled size 6 city needs to have a reason for its existence. So far I don't see much going for it:

Has terrible growth
Has no irrigated grasslands, particularly no riverside grasslands
Has no strategic resources
Is producing almost no commerce (I am counting exactly the center tile and the trade routes from my calculations)

Even if this paragon of cities was founded as a blocking city, there must be something actually productive it can do (and I'm not going to call inefficient pumping of settlers every 11.5 turns productive and it will be 11.5 turns since the preparation of the whip for the settler will stunt your growth for a turn). Give it another food source or change the forests into farms and you might have the start of a half decent settler pump.

And if you really have no irrigation out there to fool around with, maybe you need to start cottaging up the grasslands to get something out of this city. All you need is the granary and a monument and it is set up to be at least a marginal commerce city which is better than its current use. The forests that get chopped to build the cottages can be used to make a barracks and some units for attack or future HR purposes.

There's always HR to improve happiness, once you get access to it. The same argument of saved worker turns applies to the grassland forest city.

No it doesn't really. The more you grow, the worse the forests become. If you aren't growing into improved tiles I strongly doubt that it is worth it at all to do so given that there is a cost to the happiness garrison both initial (hammer cost) and permanent (upkeep gold cost). Not to mention the fact that each tile you work has a cost associated directly with it (civic upkeep and IIRC one of the city maintenance numbers is increased slightly with population) so that extra grassland forest is not free by any means.

 

[Artichoker]

One thing I forgot to mention...overflow hammers from the whip. So, maybe it's a better idea to have a whip cycle slightly less than the 10 turns required to erase unhappiness, and use the extra time to slow build something for 1 turn.

In order to do this, I'll increase the surplus food from +4F to +5F. So there's 1 grassland farm in addition to the Rice.
This time, the 42 food needed to grow from size 3 to size 6 is 8.4 turns. So, at size 3 we are working 1 Rice, 1 Farm, and 1 grassland forest. At size 6 we are working 4 grassland forests.

As before, there are 90 hammers from the 3-pop whip. Here is a chart of the hammer outputs for each city size:


size 3, 1 turn, 2 hammers
size 4, 2 turns, 6 hammers
size 5, 3 turns, 12 hammers
size 6, 2.4 turns, 12 hammers

So that's a total hammer count of 90+2+6+12+12= 122 hammers over 8.4 turns, which is 14.5 hammers per turn.

If we use this to build a Settler at size 6, the first turn will be in slow-build mode and will create 5+5 = 10 hammers. So the overflow from the 3-pop whip will be 122-100+10 = 32 hammers.
At that time, the base hammer count will be 2, resulting in 34 hammers. Another thing we can do is change 1 Grassland Forest to a Plains Forest, resulting in 35 hammers.

We can then use those 34 hammers to create a military unit, for instance. An Archer or Chariot comes to mind. If we switch 1 tile to Plains Forest, an Axeman becomes possible.

The total duration of the whip cycle, including the two turns spent in slow-build mode, is 10.4 turns.

Another variation is to have a Wheat instead of a Rice, for an extra +1 hammer. This provides an extra +1 hammer per turn, for 122+8.4 = 130.4 hammers over 8.4 turns. The whip overflow amount will then be 130.4-100+10+1 = 41.4 hammers.

In this case, the overflow hammers can be used to build a Swordsman.

This cycle will probably last until chain irrigation is gained, at which time Plains Farms can be linked to grasslands to provide irrigation. In the meantime, important builds such as Courthouses or Forges can be built, and the final whip should be a Marketplace, to enhance the output of cottages.

 

[Ibian]

Would probably be more useful if someone snapped a picture of an ingame city so we have something solid to work with.

 

[vale]

One thing I forgot to mention...overflow hammers from the whip.

Hmm no you didn't really. The hammers from the whip are hammers. Whether they are used to precisely complete the item being whipped or whether they overflow into the next build, minus a few rounding errors they are the same total number of hammers.

The only time the overflow hammers would not be just hammers that were already computed, would be if some are being converted into gold. But that won't happen when you are 3 pop whipping outside of some serious chopping going on as well.

So, maybe it's a better idea to have a whip cycle slightly less than the 10 turns required to erase unhappiness, and use the extra time to slow build something for 1 turn.

The extra time is part of the whip cycle. You can't say oh look I produced X hammers over 8.4 turns so the whip is giving me X hammers per turn when in reality to even accomplish that whip you are having to do something very specific over the next 2 turns to prepare the whip. When you average those in, it isn't 14.5 hammers per turn with your method. Don't worry, you can get 14.5 hammers a turn by whipping once you have a rice and a farm, but you have to "waste" worker turns building some mines.

In order to do this, I'll increase the surplus food from +4F to +5F. So there's 1 grassland farm in addition to the Rice.

Wonderful. I hope you can beat the 16 hammers a turn I can get just by stagnating at population 7 and working the rice, the farm and 5 grassland hills.

This time, the 42 food needed to grow from size 3 to size 6 is 8.4 turns. So, at size 3 we are working 1 Rice, 1 Farm, and 1 grassland forest. At size 6 we are working 4 grassland forests.

Your math is off here. If you really are operating at +5 food a turn, then you aren't working 4 grassland forests. And if you are working 4 grassland forests at population 6, then the regrow time will be more than 8.4 turns.

As before, there are 90 hammers from the 3-pop whip. Here is a chart of the hammer outputs for each city size:


size 3, 1 turn, 2 hammers
size 4, 2 turns, 6 hammers
size 5, 3 turns, 12 hammers
size 6, 2.4 turns, 12 hammers

I'll fix this to make it more efficient and also fix some growth results you had wrong (unfortunately I will be forced to "waste" some worker turns building mines to do this):
Turn 0 (whip turn) 31/26 food +92 hammers
Turn 1 36/26=23/28 food +3 hammers
Turn 2 28/28=14/30 food +4 hammers
Turn 3 19/30 food +4 hammers
Turn 4 24/30 food +4 hammers
Turn 5 29/30 food +4 hammers
Turn 6 34/30=19/32 food +5 hammers
Turn 7 24/32 food +5 hammers
Turn 8 29/32 food +11 hammers (zomg I'm pulling three tiles off grassland forests and putting them on grassland mines since I only need 2 food for next turn)
Turn 9 31/32 food +13 hammers (Now I'm in full production mode as I build a settler for a turn working the rice, 4 grassland mines and a grassland forest)
Start of turn 10 (end of cycle 31/32 food and 145 total hammers produced)
14.5 hammers a turn and ready to whip the settler for 3. Hmm, seems like I was doing better just stagnating for 16 hammers a turn. What went wrong? Oh. Could it be that this city is still food poor and totally unsuitable for 3 pop whips? It can't possibly be that.

So that's a total hammer count of 90+2+6+12+12= 122 hammers over 8.4 turns, which is 14.5 hammers per turn.

Well no. You have to at minimum add in the turn building the settler for 10 hammers a turn. So that is 132 hammers over 9.4 turns which is 14 hammers a turn. And if you are whipping very 9.4 turns it probably won't bite you in terms of happiness, but every 10 whips you are getting 6 extra turns of whip anger. It is really hard to call it a whip cycle if you are stacking whip anger. Cause we can play that game to excess and stack whip anger even faster to make our numbers look better.

So the overflow from the 3-pop whip will be 122-100+10 = 32 hammers.

No. This is so wrong, I don't even know where you came up with this idea.

Where is the 122 coming from? The overflow from the settler build will come from hammers put into the settler. The hammers you are getting while growing don't make it to the settler at all.

At that time, the base hammer count will be 2, resulting in 34 hammers. Another thing we can do is change 1 Grassland Forest to a Plains Forest, resulting in 35 hammers.

Sure you could do that. It slows your regrowth which is pretty important to maintaining what little efficiency this city is attempting to achieve while whipping.

We can then use those 34 hammers to create a military unit, for instance. An Archer or Chariot comes to mind. If we switch 1 tile to Plains Forest, an Axeman becomes possible.

You are going at this all wrong. Of the 145 hammers I'm producing in my (fixed) whip cycle for you, 100 of them are going into a settler. That leaves 45 that you can spend however you want. It doesn't even take much work to set things up that way. Fine. An axeman and some change. Great. Whipping rocks in this food poor city. Or I could just have 160 hammers to spend in whatever way I want by stagnating. So maybe it doesn't

The total duration of the whip cycle, including the two turns spent in slow-build mode, is 10.4 turns.

To make it better you really should get that to 10 turns like I did and also make sure that it is working good tiles like mines as often as possible like I did.

Another variation is to have a Wheat instead of a Rice, for an extra +1 hammer.This provides an extra +1 hammer per turn, for 122+8.4 = 130.4 hammers over 8.4 turns.

This wheat gives the same +1 hammer a turn to any plan that involves working it all the time. So relative to any other plan, the whip cycle gains nothing. Make it a grassland corn and you may have something (you don't but you may).

The whip overflow amount will then be 130.4-100+10+1 = 41.4 hammers.

Wrong again. This is not how hammer overflow works.

In this case, the overflow hammers can be used to build a Swordsman.

In this case you will have 55 hammers over 10 turns that you can do whatever you want with. So yes I think that is enough for a swordsman. But it isn't overflow hammers. But in this case the stagnation will have 170 hammers over 10 turns to spend however it wants. I like that option better personally since 170>155 and 170>55. Seems like a win win all around to just work my good tiles instead of forcing myself to work bad tiles.

This cycle will probably last until chain irrigation is gained, at which time Plains Farms can be linked to grasslands to provide irrigation. In the meantime, important builds such as Courthouses or Forges can be built, and the final whip should be a Marketplace, to enhance the output of cottages.

Or you could just break it immediately by whipping a worker and mining your hills instead of "conserving" worker turns.

Here. Lets at least be fair to whipping. Lets give the city unlimited grassland farms, the same rice tile and unlimited hills of both types. Stagnation at population 7 is still stuck at 16 hammers a turn (rice, farm and 5 grassland hills) but whipping has become much much much better than it used to be.

Why is that? Because you don't lose so many tile turns during regrowth and you aren't forced to work bad tiles as long as when we had no food. Lets check. The plan will be to grow back to population 6 as soon as possible, while also making sure we work the best tiles we have as often as possible.

Turn 0 31/26 food +91 hammers
Turn 1 37/26=24/28 food +1 hammers
Turn 2 32/28=18/30 food +1 hammers
Turn 3 26/30 food ...

Now we stop. We only need 4 food to grow to population 6 here but we are producing +8. So we could conceivably move to the more efficient mines while maintaining enough food to grow to help us be even more efficient. Lets see how. To get from 26/30 food at the start of turn 3 to 31/32 food at the start of turn 9 (we still need to reserve a turn to prebuild a settler), we will need 20 food. That is 3.33 food a turn (i.e 2 turns at +4 food and 4 turns at +3 food). So producing 4 food this turn while growing will not screw up our pace and we can afford to get the tile configuration that makes this work. So lets see. How about we work the rice, 2 grassland farms and 2 grassland mines for a total of +4 food and +7 hammers. Let me add that in.

Turn 3 26/30 food +7 hammers
Turn 4 15/32 food +8 hammers (rice, farm x3, grassland mine, plains mine)
Turn 5 19/32 food +10 hammers(rice, farm x2, grassland mine x3)
Turn 6 22/32 food +10 hammers
Turn 7 25/32 food +10 hammers
Turn 8 28/32 food +10 hammers
Turn 9 31/32 food +14 hammers(building settler with max number of mines)
Turn 10 31/32 food total of 162 hammers. Alright! Finally something that can actually claim to do something better than just pure stagnation (just barely).

And keep in mind that in this settler whip situation, 100 of those hammers are going into a settler. So only 62 hammers make it into other applications each cycle. So now you actually have a tradeoff here.

Benefits of whipping:
Get some immediate gratification (although it is a settler type of gratification)
Produce slightly more hammers over time

Benefits of stagnation:
Total flexibility with the use of its hammers over time.

 

[Artichoker]

OK, I was wrong on the overflow hammers...so it's simpler than I thought it was. But let's get back to the main point.

I see a few drawbacks with the grow-and-stagnate option:

1) The Grassland Hills must be physically present and mined in order to reap the full benefits.

a) If they are not mined, then you get 1H instead of 3H from the tile.

b) If they are not present, then you have to substitute with other tiles such as Plains Forest or Plains Hill, which have inferior yield to the Grassland Hill.

2) Statistically speaking, having 5 Grassland Hills in a city is a lot, much harder to get than 4 Grassland Forests.

3) It takes a substantial amount of worker turns to finish building 5 mines, not to mention the time it takes for the worker to move to each mine.


However, there are some advantages of whipping with Grassland Forests:

1) With the whipping option, the initial whip has the advantage of an accelerated build time, which can be crucial especially when building Settlers.

2) When the Settler production is no longer needed, the Grassland Forests can be chopped (preferably after Mathematics) and then finally cottaged to transform the city into a commerce city.

3) For the remaining hammmers produced besides the Settler, it's still possible to leave unfinished items in the queue for the next cycle to continue.

Your math is off here. If you really are operating at +5 food a turn, then you aren't working 4 grassland forests. And if you are working 4 grassland forests at population 6, then the regrow time will be more than 8.4 turns.

I see nothing wrong with having +5 food and working 4 grassland forests. It goes like this:

At size 6, the tiles are:

city tile, 2F
rice, 4F
grassland farm, 3F
grassland forest, 2F
grassland forest, 2F
grassland forest, 2F
grassland forest, 2F

So that's 7 tiles, for a total food value of 17, of which 12 are needed to support the city's population. That leaves 5 food as surplus.

 

[UncleJJ]

Artichoker; I agree with your ideas about being able to use a city with grassland forests in the very early days of REXing when having enough workers to improve all the tiles can be a problem. A grassland forest is indeed one of the best unimproved tiles you can work. But it loses out to grassland and plains hills if these can be fed. This is what vale is doing.

Consider this simple combination of food neutral tiles and you'll see their limitation. A grassland farm is the worst of all tiles that have a food surplus it gives a mere 3 food or +1 food. Let's match that with the hills to get food neutrality.

1 Gr farm + 1 Gr hill = 3H = average of 1.5H per tile
2 Gr farm + 1 PL hill = 4H = average of 1.33H per tile

These combinations clearly outperform the same number grassland forests or plains farms in the early game. And that's using the worst type of tile to feed hills. If a better tile like the unirrigated rice is used then it is twice as good providing the food and even better averages are given.

The 2F1H tiles only really do well in low food cities and for small city sizes. So they are useful in the very circumstances you initially outlined but lose out later in the game once tile improvements become available and enough workers have had time to make them. A little later in the game once chain irrigation is available I would normally remove grassland forests for either farms or cottages keeping a few only for health reasons.

Sorry if I'm stating the obvious here but you seem to have lost sight of these fundamental truths and the reason vale is beating you in these "hammer competitions" is mainly due to this.

 

[vale]

I see a few drawbacks with the grow-and-stagnate option:

1) The Grassland Hills must be physically present and mined in order to reap the full benefits.

a) If they are not mined, then you get 1H instead of 3H from the tile.

If they aren't mined, you mine them.

b) If they are not present, then you have to substitute with other tiles such as Plains Forest or Plains Hill, which have inferior yield to the Grassland Hill.

Ok sure yeah this is true. This "production" city is in a terrible spot then.

2) Statistically speaking, having 5 Grassland Hills in a city is a lot, much harder to get than 4 Grassland Forests.

This is true. But I don't typically place my cities down uniformly at random, I actually tend to look at the sites ahead of time and say...hold on, I'm settling an apparent production city with one (bad) food source and no hills and look elsewhere.

3) It takes a substantial amount of worker turns to finish building 5 mines, not to mention the time it takes for the worker to move to each mine.

Back to the good old standby, worker turns. You aren't getting enough workers. It also takes a long time to grow to population 6 at +4 (or +5) food surplus even if you chop out a granary asap, plenty of time to get those workers out.

However, there are some advantages of whipping with Grassland Forests:

1) With the whipping option, the initial whip has the advantage of an accelerated build time, which can be crucial especially when building Settlers.

Sure. Sped up hammers are good. I can't really argue with that. And if you really want a Settler asap, I would say whip, but still try to be efficient about it. That means improving your tiles.

2) When the Settler production is no longer needed, the Grassland Forests can be chopped (preferably after Mathematics) and then finally cottaged to transform the city into a commerce city.

Aha! So this was a commerce city! I kind of suspected all along that it was. But it is a really really crappy one right with no riverside grasslands and poor growth. So it seems like it was settled pretty early if these Settler builds are still so critical out of peripheral cities.

3) For the remaining hammmers produced besides the Settler, it's still possible to leave unfinished items in the queue for the next cycle to continue.

Of course, I didn't say you had no chance of building a market in this city ever while doing this (for example). I just said you are making fewer hammers than otherwise possible and they are inflexible because only a small amount is put into non settler builds every 10 turns.

I see nothing wrong with having +5 food and working 4 grassland forests...

Yeah my bad, for whatever reason I was thinking you were saying that at pop 5. So thats fine but your per turn hammer ratio still is wonky when you are averaging only over the first 8.4 turns when you really aren't ready to whip again for 9.4 turns.

Now I have a question for you. Find an in game example where a city like this would be settled relatively early (say within the first two expansion cities) where Settler pumping is out of this city is critical.

I'm really struggling imagining this. I'll be generous. You can replace the non irrigated rice with non irrigated wheat but the other constraints are:

If there are no plains hills, at most 3 grassland hills in the big fat cross
If there is a plains hill, at most 2 grassland hills in the big fat cross
At most one irrigated grassland tile.
No strategic resources that you know of. (so it could turn out to have iron in the BFC, but when you are planning the settler for it, you should not know that or use it in your calculations)
No pre-calendar commerce resources.
At least 4 grassland forests beyond the irrigated grassland mentioned earlier (you can't count irrigated plains tiles because that wastes worker turns).
The city needs to have some chance to get to a happy cap of 7 by the time it gets to population 6 (so charismatic with a monument and a happy resource in the empire is fine).

I'm really interested as to why a city like this would be settled so early and then be forced into an inefficient production role because of the odd timing of its settlement.

 

[Artichoker]

Now I have a question for you. Find an in game example where a city like this would be settled relatively early (say within the first two expansion cities) where Settler pumping is out of this city is critical.

...

The city needs to have some chance to get to a happy cap of 7 by the time it gets to population 6 (so charismatic with a monument and a happy resource in the empire is fine).

I'm really interested as to why a city like this would be settled so early and then be forced into an inefficient production role because of the odd timing of its settlement.

Before we go there, let's add another twist...instead of having a happy cap of 7, let's have a happy cap of 6 instead.

What happens now?

For the stagnate and build case, it's no longer an option to grow to size 7. Now, you're stuck with only 6 worked tiles and the city tile.

But for the whip option, even with the +1 unhappiness from the whip, city sizes 3, 4, and 5 can still operate without unhappy citizens.

What does this do to the numbers?

Since the city now has 1 unhappy citizen at size 6, the food surplus goes down from +5 to +3. So to get the 12 food necessary to be 1 less than the growth requirement, it takes 4 turns instead of 2.4, thus adding another 1.6 turns to the whip cycle. Does this mean we need to add another +1 to the food surplus to get the whip cycle back down to 10?

Let's check.

For the 4 growth stages in the whip, the food requirements are:

Stage 1: 1 Food
grow from size 3 to size 4
Stage 2: 14 Food
grow from size 4 to size 5
Stage 3: 15 Food
grow from size 5 to size 6
Stage 4: 12 Food
prepare for whipping Settler

Only in Stage 4 does the whip option suffer a disadvantage from the lowered happy cap. But the stagnate option suffers the disadvantage by having to stagnate at size 6 instead of size 7.

But how much of a disadvantage is this really, for the whip option?

Suppose we do increase the Food surplus from +5 to +6. It then becomes +4 at size 6 only. So the duration of the whip cycle becomes, for Stage 1 through Stage 3:

(1+14+15)/6 = 5 turns

For Stage 4:

12/4 = 3 turns

So now the whip cycle, not including the 1 turn for the Settler, is 8 turns, and the 1 turn of preparation for the Settler makes it 9 turns. It thus requires 1 turn of stagnation to reach the ideal whip cycle of 10 turns.

Since we now have a food surplus of +6, we will need to change our configuration:

size 3: city tile, wheat, 2 gr farms
size 4: city tile, wheat, 2 gr farms, gr forest
size 5: city tile, wheat, 2 gr farms, 2 gr forests

To get the 1 turn of stagnation at size 6, we basically need to lower the surplus food at size 6 by 1. So the number of turns spent at Stage 4 then becomes:

12/3 = 4 turns

The configuration for size 6 is then:

size 6: city tile, wheat, 2 gr farms, gr forest, pl forest, unhappy

We have switched a grassland forest to a plains forest to get an extra hammer instead of food.

So, what's the hammer count?

size 3, 1 turn, 2 hammers
size 4, 2 turns, 6 hammers
size 5, 2 turns, 8 hammers
size 6, 4 turns + 1 turn, 20+8 = 28 hammers

The hammer count of the 1 turn of settler preparation is 5+3 = 8, which is shown above. There's a small chance we can't get it in 1 turn, since 8+90=98<100, but as long as the overflow from the previous build is at least 2, then we can get it.

The total hammer count including the 3-pop whip is:

90+2+6+8+28 = 134

Which is lower than before, but this is because of the lowered happy cap. However, it's still a good 134/10 = 13.4 hammers per turn for a city without hills.

Let's look at the stagnate option...remember, our happy cap is now 6 instead of 7, so the city will be stagnating at size 6.

Our single food resource is still a wheat, even though the food surplus has increased to +6. This is because we have 2 grassland farms to help growth.

Let's assume the stagnating city works both the wheat and the 2 farms. With a city size of 6, that leaves 3 tiles. They can be chosen as plains hills. So the hammer count is:

city tile, 1
wheat, 1
2 farms, 0
3 plains hills, 12

total, 14

Or, we can swap out 2 plains hills and 2 farms for 2 grassland hills and 2 grassland forests, but the result is the same.

Is it higher than whip option? Yes, but remember that it required improving 3 more tiles. If the whipping city has a grassland hill, for instance, it can be used instead of a plains forest to add +1 hammer at size 6 for 5 turns, increasing the total hammer count to 139, for an average of 13.9 per turn.

 

[Ibian]

Omg beancounters.

Snap a picture of an ingame city, other guy WBs it, then see who can get the mostest hammers the fastest already.

 

[vale]

It depends on the tiles and the plan. Lets figure out how the grassland forest option works with 2 possible options. I'm giving myself one grassland farm to go with the rice because it makes things possible.

Option 1: We whip from 15/32 food and don't allow ourself to grow into unhappy population

Option 2: We whip from 31/32 food and allow unhappy population (to get back to our original food) but try to minimize it.

I'll say it before I even do the analysis that option 1 will be strictly superior, but lets go ahead and figure this out. I'm not claiming that option 1 will beat everything, just option 2.

		Option 1			Option 2
Turn 0		15/26 food +92 hammers		31/26 food +92 hammers
Turn 1		20/26 food +2 hammers		23/28 food +3 hammers
Turn 2		25/26 food +2 hammers		14/30 food +4 hammers
Turn 3		17/28 food +3 hammers		19/30 food +4 hammers
Turn 4		22/28 food +3 hammers		24/30 food +4 hammers
Turn 5		27/28 food +3 hammers		29/30 food +4 hammers
Turn 6		18/30 food +4 hammers		19/32 food +4 hammers
Turn 7		23/30 food +4 hammers		22/32 food +4 hammers
Turn 8		28/30 food +13 hammers 		25/32 food +4 hammers
Turn 9 		28/30 food +10 hammers		28/32 food +4 hammers
Turn 10		15/32 food 136 total hammers	31/32 food 127 total hammers

To be fair to option 2, I did give option 1 the use of grassland mines on turn 8 and 9. But change those to plains forests and it is still making 129 hammers over time as opposed to 127 hammers. Plus option 2 still hasn't had time to prebuild a settler so isn't ready to whip yet and will be delaying the next whip cycle for a turn while it does so that is bad.

Incidentally, the best food level to start at would have been 19/32 food because it is reachable in one turn of growth from population 5 and maximizes the food stored. If we had started with that we could produce 138 hammers assuming the presence of mines and 131 hammers if we had to work plains forests. So far so good.

Stagnation can work 6 tiles. The natural production option is rice, farm, plains hill, 3 x grass hill or rice, grassland forest, 4 x grass hill for 14 hammers a turn which is (barely) better than the 13.8 hammers a turn optimal whipping got. Thats better.

Now if you give me unlimited grassland farms in addition to the other stuff I'm using, whipping actually can destroy stagnation. For instance the cycle starting from 22/32 food can produce 15.1 hammers a turn while stagnation is still stuck on 14 hammers a turn.

 

[vale]

The hammer count of the 1 turn of settler preparation is 5+3 = 8, which is shown above. There's a small chance we can't get it in 1 turn, since 8+90=98<100, but as long as the overflow from the previous build is at least 2, then we can get it.

No we can't. Overflow doesn't magically appear in whatever build you want. And if you overflow your prior whip into a new settler that slows your growth. Overflow into a settler is about the last possible thing you want to do in a tight whipping situation.

So with your option with no mines you will have to spend 2 turns prebuilding the settler which is bad.

But you can fix the problem simply by not doing the plains forest thing at population 6 and getting yourself to 31/32 food asap where you can stagnate by prebuilding the settler for however many turns necessary. So I won't worry too much about it except to point out that your ideas about overflow don't work.

 

[vale]

Let's assume the stagnating city works both the wheat and the 2 farms.

This is a terrible assumption.

If you give me the wheat instead of the rice that I used in my post above, I will work:
wheat
grassland mine x 4
grassland forest

For 15 hammers a turn. Which again kills the whipping option you had. I don't know why you felt the need to switch a rice to a wheat. It adds 1 hammer a turn across the board which really gains nothing for the comparison.

Is it higher than whip option? Yes, but remember that it required improving 3 more tiles. If the whipping city has a grassland hill, for instance, it can be used instead of a plains forest to add +1 hammer at size 6 for 5 turns, increasing the total hammer count to 139, for an average of 13.9 per turn.

By my count I needed 5 improved tiles (wheat and 4 mines) to your three (wheat and 2 farms). So thats only 2 more tile improvements. To get 16 extra hammers over 10 turns.

Or give yourself the mine and I'm still producing 11 extra hammers over 10 turns for 1 extra tile improvement.

 

[vicawoo]

So i skimmed through a lot of the last posts, because I thought most of the results were blindingly obvious and a waste of time, so I might sound very stupid.

Why are you guys going step by step through situations when you can simply prove general statements?

Useful things to know:
Food to hammer conversion per pop.
There's a cap in how much food you can convert due to happiness. The exception is when you are say whipping catapults without abandon, in which case you should go almost all food.
Pop turns lost to regrowth is lowered by higher food surplus, this is the only real gray area since you're comparing unequal tiles (say grassland farm versus mine).
When you're purposefully stagnating due to happy cap and waiting for whip anger, Switch to higher hammer, lower food tiles. Or just the highest hammer tiles you can support without starving.

Oh, and if you whip at food 31/32 (you could do 32/32 if you disallow growth), your food overflow will put you above half food after the whip, which means your granary will not be full when you grow again. IE you lose food.

 

[vale]

Food to hammer conversion per pop.

No because people misapply this ALL the time and say things like grassland forests are better than grassland mines which is wrong much more often than right.