Whipping Guide?

[FrancisMarion]

I almost never use whipping on anything. I just never learned how to use it effectively, and the more I read here the more I think it's really holding my game back, so I was just wondering if someone could either link me to a whipping guide, or give me the basics on whipping (when should I do it? On what? How often?)

I play on monarch/aggressive AI, and I run a SE if that info helps.

Thanks.

 

[Mesousa]

Whips, chains, and more: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=193659

 

[slobberinbear]

Whipping is an art form, and not just for the sadomasochists.

Whipping is best used in the following situations:

• 
  You have an emergency military need
  You need to complete something quicker
  You have excess unhappy population
  You want to use the magic of whip overflow

In general, you want to use the whip so that your happiness situation is better or at least no worse than it was before you whipped.

Generally, you also want to use the whip so that your city will be able to regrow. Using the whip without food production and/or a granary to regrow is costly in the long run. Because the food in your "food bar" remains after whipping, a lot of folks like to whip when the food bar is high, allowing the city to quickly regrow (especially if the city has a granary).

Sometimes, however, you have the opposite problem, especially if you are using the whip to eliminate unhappy citizens. You whip a high-growth city, and it grows right back to the size it was, with one more unhappy face. What to do? Try whipping a happiness building (temple, etc.), or whip something that uses more than one population. Another tactic is to whip and then start building a worker or settler, which halts city growth.

Whip overflow is whipping a project that you have almost completed. You lose the population point but the excess ("wasted") hammers from using the whip go into your next project.

Whipping starts to become counterproductive at higher population levels, due to the ever-increasing amount of food it takes to grow bigger. You therefore suffer more lost production due to the fact that it takes you longer to grow back to that production level. Once you have Hereditary Rule, managing happiness is a matter of garrisoning enough cheap troops, and your bigger cities' production rates will be generally better than what you can get from whipping.

Hope that helps.

 

[FrancisMarion]

Thanks... that's both way more complicated than I thought and incredibly powerful.

Time to go whip my populace into shape

 

[Polycrates]

slobberinbear covered it extremely well, there's a few other things I would add though:

Don't whip something on the first turn if you can help it, you pay a 50% hammer penalty.

Particularly in the early game when happiness is at a premium, you want to avoid whipping away a single population point if at all possible. For building early military units, this takes a bit of micromanagement. You want to ensure that (for axemen or spearmen) your first turn's production is less than five (on normal) or less than seven (on epic). You then whip two people on the second turn and get enough overflow to produce another unit almost immediately. To manage this, you may have to burn some previous overflow on a worker or something and switch around the city's production for the first turn (you can switch it back as soon as you whip). For swords or catapults, you want less than ten hammers on normal or less than fifteen on epic.

Settlers and workers are often prime candidates for whipping, since they're stopping growth anyway. This is particularly so for settlers for Imperialistic civs and workers for Expansive civs because whipping produces all hammers which contribute fully to their production bonus (and excess food doesn't).

Around the middle ages, you'll probably find you're able to build a whole lot of expensive commerce buildings (market, university, bank, grocer, observatory etc), but that the cities that would benefit the most from them are going to take forever to actually build them. At this point, I like to whip the hell out of my big commerce cities (no matter how big) in one huge painful stroke, whipping as many of the relevant buildings as possible in as short a time as possible, even if it means whipping them from size sixteen to size four (and then back to four as soon as they reach eight again). This way, you only have the slow regrowth to the high population levels once. Commerce will suffer terribly in the short term, but before long it will grow back stronger than ever (and it also gives a headstart on the building prerequisites for Oxford Uni and Wall Street).

DON'T whip production cities (unless absolutely necessary) - they produce so many hammers and grow so slowly that you're better off letting them produce normally.

 

[yavoon]

I'd say the first step to whipping is whipping as often as humanly reasonable. once u know how often u can whip u can work out the intricacies later. try to kill as many ppl as possible, that requires whipping at the optimum time interval(10 turns if normal) and whipping as many ppl away as u can manage at a wack.

think of urself as the cruelest person history has ever known.

 

[FrancisMarion]

Yeah I think I need a few games where I just go crazy with the whipping cause I'm still pretty timid about using it.

 

[Gnarfflinger]

I will disrupt a wonder to build a cheapo unit, let it work for a few turns, then whip and put the overflow on the wonder.

 

[Black_Waltz]

Whipping is godly. I was in your position until my last game. Hadn't really understood the whipping concept and liked roleplaying the "nice" leader.

However, as the English on the 18 civ World Map (latest Expansion) I tried it out in conjuction with another strat I never use - early war. Granted, it wasn't as early as I liked. Had to wait for Iron to get hooked up before I could attack the French but it was insanely powerful opening gambit. I expanded so much more faster - to the point where I feel in a few more games I can bump up my difficulty level. I whipped everything from Barracks, I would build one axeman then immediately whip another (Two for One). It made me sad to switch to Serfdom.

 

[frob2900]

Yeah I think I need a few games where I just go crazy with the whipping cause I'm still pretty timid about using it.

Here's the best medicine: Once you decide to go to war, build units for 1-2 turns, then select all cities with some hammers invested in units (by clicking on the city bar while holding Alt) then choose whip. You'll get one unit per city instantly. Repeat in a few turns.

You'll be amazed how fast you get an army, and even more amazed how fast your cities grow back.

This works best at the classical (Axemen/Spears/Catapults) or early medieval (Macemen/Catapults) stage.

Oh, and obviously, if some city really, really sucks at regrowth (e.g. no irrigated tiles.. plains only etc.) then leave it out of the mass-whip.

 

[Martinus]

Heh, I'm also a late convert to the Whip religion - it's awesome when used right. In fact I managed to move from Prince to Monarch and win a couple of my first games on Monarch largely because of the whip (I never could keep up with the AI military, production-wise before).