Whipping + Granaries

Well, come on now, you don't start with monarchy in 4000 BC and even once you get there, you'll end up with a whole bunch of unhappy as soon as those units walk off if you're whipping at actual city growth rate instead of cruel oppression rate (if city growth rate is faster). I mean, sometimes whipping faster than oppression rate is warranted but the only time you'll want to do that hyper-extensively is catapult theater
I have begun oracle slingshotting to monarchy recently. Happiness ceases to be a problem very fast.

Catapult theater... i saw a thread with that name a while back but didnt read it.

Whipping stops being a good option past size 10 if there are mines and/or workshops available.
 
Here's a question:

Usually I go for HR reasonably early in the game (pre-0AD). Once I hit HR I usually ditch slavery and just try to grow to the health caps in all my cities.

This is the habit that I am trying to break. But people are saying slavery is less effecient at higher pop levels.

So, I'm confused a bit. Once I hit HR should I whip a lot still or try to grow to the health cap?

My instinct based on reading this thread is to whip the infrastructure and then grow to health cap. Does that make sense?
 
Whipping kills citizens of the foreign nationality, but when they grow back, they are your nationality.

Only in Civ3.

In Civ4 nationality is based on the culture of your city tile.
 
Here's a question:

Usually I go for HR reasonably early in the game (pre-0AD). Once I hit HR I usually ditch slavery and just try to grow to the health caps in all my cities.

This is the habit that I am trying to break. But people are saying slavery is less effecient at higher pop levels.

So, I'm confused a bit. Once I hit HR should I whip a lot still or try to grow to the health cap?

My instinct based on reading this thread is to whip the infrastructure and then grow to health cap. Does that make sense?
Whip what you need when you need it. Until you hit size 10.
 
Futurehermit:

When people say slavery is less efficient at high population, that is because it takes more food to grow from 12 to 13 than it did to grow from 5 to 6. So the hammers-food trade is better at smaller population.

But if you have plenty of quality tiles to be working, then the benefit of working those tiles will far, far outweigh the less efficient use of the whip, so by all means grow.

That said, your plan is probably good. Whip the basic infrastructure ASAP (granary, forge) and then grow while building the other stuff. That will give your workers some time to improve enough tiles to make a big population worthwhile. And once you get to your happiness cap, you can still whip. Just because it isn't as efficient as it was at size 4-6 doesn't mean it still isn't worthwhile to whip situationally.
 
Here's a question:

Usually I go for HR reasonably early in the game (pre-0AD). Once I hit HR I usually ditch slavery and just try to grow to the health caps in all my cities.

This is the habit that I am trying to break. But people are saying slavery is less effecient at higher pop levels.

So, I'm confused a bit. Once I hit HR should I whip a lot still or try to grow to the health cap?

My instinct based on reading this thread is to whip the infrastructure and then grow to health cap. Does that make sense?

To me it depends on what I could do with a high population, am I trying to grow cottages? Do I want to switch to CS and work lots of scientists (obv I'll stop whipping then). If I'm in slavery it's not uncommon that I keep whipping in my production cities for some time after I stopped in my commerce cities. Even if you could get a higher production in them if you grow to happy cap there's the tradeoff of getting that next building or unit NOW. Short term vs long term.
Also regarding whipping settlers early, this is highly dependant on how much time you have to get the spots you want, if you're isolated I would be very lenient with the settler-whipping.

I don't think there's any fast and easy answers here. The only thing that remains constant for me is that I'll whip a monument unless creative and a granary in all new cities asap if I'm in slavery.
 
With rare exceptions, whip/chop the granary first. The granary is essential to regrowth and makes subsequent whips twice as effective.
Build the forge next, because it gets you a 25% bonus on subsequent whips.
After that, you may want a lighthouse or a library or a harbor. Rarely, I will insert a lighthouse before the granary or forge on an island city with only seafood.

If you have seafood/coastal, whipping the lighthouse before the granary is actually slightly advantageous, assuming you start with a new city and have a workboat working your seafood. Not by much, but I ran the numbers a while back and you get to size 4 with a lighthouse and granary one or two turns earlier if you whip the lighthouse first and the granary second rather than the other way around.

Contrary to what other people have to say here about the benefits of HR for whipping, I think that Representation from the Pyramids is the best civic in combination with whipping in the Classical and Medieaval era (whipping forges, markets etc). The trick is that Representation gives +3 happy to your 5 largest cities, and when you whip a city it will cease to be one of your 5 largest, but it will drop under the happy cap anyway, so that doesn't matter. Then a different city can grow larger because it is now one of the 5 largest, until you whip that one, etc.
 
Proper whipping results in far more than 3 frownie faces in any food rich city. And representation only actually has a 2 happy face benefit since you will have at least one troop in every city anyway.

Now assuming all cities have 4 grassland mines available, then a case could be made for representation if you also run a GP farm (which is what i attempted to do recently), but production can sometimes be hard to come by. It is far easier to get some farms than some mines when all you have to work with is flatland.
 
Contrary to what other people have to say here about the benefits of HR for whipping, I think that Representation from the Pyramids is the best civic in combination with whipping in the Classical and Medieaval era (whipping forges, markets etc). The trick is that Representation gives +3 happy to your 5 largest cities, and when you whip a city it will cease to be one of your 5 largest, but it will drop under the happy cap anyway, so that doesn't matter. Then a different city can grow larger because it is now one of the 5 largest, until you whip that one, etc.

Civ4's version of whack-a-mole :lol:
 
Dave is definitely right about nationality being determined by culture not some genocidal whipping.

He is wrong that killing a grassland mine costs production. In some cities that is true, in some cities that is false. Whipping efficiency is influenced overwhelmingly by ability to regrow quickly (i.e food resources).

And to the original poster: 3 pop Settler whips are about the only early attainable and repeatable 3 pop whips available. They are highly efficient and if timed right can produce around 30 hammers (normal speed) into the next build. It isn't even really much micromanagement.

Tools you need:

Granary
Happy cap of 7 to allow this to be a cycle that begins and ends with a Settler whip
A production bonus of less than 75% on Settlers. Any more and the 3 pop whip becomes unavailable.

Build the settler to the turn before it would cost 2 to whip. This is the beancounting/micromanagement step, but it isn't really that bad and can usually be done by a rule of thumb if you don't feel like calculating it out:

no production bonus: 3-4 turns of building before the whip
25% production bonus: 1-2 turn of building before the whip
50% production bonus: 1 micromanaged turn of building before the whip (you need to minimize the hammers you are putting into the settler).

If you like to go by actual numbers, then on normal:
no production bonus: fewer than 40 hammers invested
25% production bonus: fewer than 25 hammers invested
50% production bonus: fewer than 10 hammers invested
 
Hmm. My general whipping tip is to finish chopping a forest 1 turn after a unit will be done; on the last turn, whip, and the next few units will come out one per turn.
 
Well, come on now, you don't start with monarchy in 4000 BC and even once you get there, you'll end up with a whole bunch of unhappy as soon as those units walk off if you're whipping at actual city growth rate instead of cruel oppression rate (if city growth rate is faster). I mean, sometimes whipping faster than oppression rate is warranted but the only time you'll want to do that hyper-extensively is catapult theater

It's often ok to turn a city or two into junker cities for 1/4 of the game or more if it nets you tons of new cities.
 
He is wrong that killing a grassland mine costs production. In some cities that is true, in some cities that is false. Whipping efficiency is influenced overwhelmingly by ability to regrow quickly (i.e food resources).

Can you give a specific example (or screenshot) where this is false?
 
If you do that, you may end up converting some of the hammers into gold which in general I would say is a bad thing.
I dont think that applies to overflow from whipping and chopping. I have had low hammer cities with 120 hammers from chopping before, didnt seem to waste any of it. This usually happens if i have been building gold somewhere, the chops are not applied to the built gold but to whatever i build after that.
 
I think if you overflow an item that costs x, then you can overflow up to x hammers. Anything more than that gets converted to gold. If you are protective and have stone, you can whip/chop to overflow on a wall build and get a decent amount of cash this way. But yeah. usually it's a bad deal. Don't put more than double an items hammer cost into building it.
 
Here is the start position. It is an epic game, so we will play 15 turns(the length of a whip cycle) from this point:



The goal is to produce as many hammers as possible in those 15 turns. No padding stats by stacking whip anger or anything like that. Just good old fashioned killing of grassland mines.

The killing grassland mines option builds a settler for one turn then whips it and builds a library with the overflow plus some turns of production while regrowing. When it hits the happy cap, it starts a settler. Total hammers produced:
135 (library) + 149 (settler) + 89 (partial settler build) = 373 hammers

Also note that because of the ridiculous regrowth rate, this city had to work some sub par tiles while finishing the library at population 6 to avoid growing into unhappiness. I could have skewed these numbers further by switching to a settler immediately at population 6 and working only the premium tiles the whole time.



The second test attempts to avoid killing of grassland mines. So it builds a library for one turn then shifts production to settlers (which are going to be the highest hammer yield it can get with these tiles, until time expires) It produces 2 settlers in the time frame, and ends up with 8 overflow (that will be modified by the forge to be 10 overflow) that I am counting. Total hammers produced:
149 (settler) + 149 (settler) + 25 (partial library build) + 10 (overflow) = 333 hammers.



Admittedly, the second option produces a bit more commerce, but commerce is not the point of slavery. The first option produced 40 more hammers over 15 turns which is 2.67 hammers a turn. And it could have been worse if I arranged it so I only worked premium tiles the whole time.

Admittedly, this example is highly skewed in favor of killing the mines. But even if one of those clams was not improved it still would be superior to kill the mines.
 
Monarchist cookbook save ;) .....

This only shows that we need a good up-to-date guide on how to whip ( I would be one of readers ,OFC ... I really need to fine tune my :whipped: )
 
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