Workers and pop-rushing

[MeteorPunch]

What about when you are going for a 20k victory and have just finished building Shakespeare's Theater (I believe this is the one, allowing you to grow over pop 12). Is it allowed to use pre-existing workers to join the city to get it to pop 20? Is this allowed? Some of my workers had been around from the beginning.

Yes. As long as you don't join them expressly to "pop" a production task.

 

[leopalas]

I´ve put some thought in to this and here r my conclusions:

In a 20K game it simply shouldnt be allowed to pop-rush after Shakespeare theater, this have a huge impact on the final result and its unfair to all of those that in that same game are pursuing other victory conditions.

In general, pop-rushing in the beggining of the game even if one or to citizens will have an exponencial result at the end. Its so good to see that city that will take 10 turns to reach size 4 get there instantly, isnt it?

The code of conduct should be CLEAR about this. The letter and spirit of the rule should be exactly the same. Not giving any latitude. Stating that "pop-rushing one or two regular citizens..." is basically ok is the same as saying that 3 in some cases is also ok and those that who are a bit more eager will take advantage of that. Thats human nature... Even if we are all true gentleman we all like to have the best result possible. So it should say " no pop-rushing at ANY time in ANY circunstance" or " go ahead knock you self out, pop-rush what you want, whenever you want". After all there is some art in.

 

[Offa]

leopalas: pop rushing is an integral part of the game, and in my opinion should definitely be allowed. It is very weak now anyway compred with the initial versions of vanilla civ3. It is joining workers to enable pop rushing that is dodgy.

Methos: joining workers to boost population is fine as long as it doesn't lead to a food deficit. I think this is what led to the dogpile exploit, whereby some players added vast numbers of workers to cities, giving the cities populations in the hundreds, and thereby getting a vast boost in their score.

 

[leopalas]

Offa, i think my english has been been betraying me... I thought pop-rushing a building or artificially increasing your city population were one and the same thing in what rules are concerned.You mean that there is no limitations as to join workers to the limit of food capabilities???

 

[Gyathaar]

Offa, i think my english has been been betraying me... I thought pop-rushing a building or artificially increasing your city population were one and the same thing in what rules are concerned.You mean that there is no limitations as to join workers to the limit of food capabilities???

pop-rushing is rushing buildings in despotism, feudalism, communism and fascism by forced labor.. where every citizen (pop(ulation)) you rush away gives 20 shields.

in vanilla and ptw there is no limit to how big your cities can become once you have a hospital and start joining workers.

in c3c there is an upper limit of 255 city size, and in addition you can't join workers if you dont have the food to support them..
however you can get around this limitation by making the city riot before you start joining workers.. since citizens in riotting cities use 0 food.. by keeping the city in a state of riot you can also keep about 250 scientists/taxmen in the city for the rest of game without loosing them (1 per turn) to starvaton.

Joining workers into cities so they go over their natural size limits is known as dogpiling

 

[leopalas]

Thx for the detailed explanation . But what i also meant is if joining workers to cities (not dogpilling) until the limits of their natural size in in accordance with GOTM rules?

 

[Jove]

But what i also meant is if joining workers to cities (not dogpilling) until the limits of their natural size in in accordance with GOTM rules?

I am sure it is okay to join workers to increase it's population, as long as you stay within the limits Gyathaar described, that is, no joining past the food limits of the town. The pop-rushing rule, as I understand it, prohibits behavior like this: In the ancient age, one town is a worker pump and one town is doomed as a pop-rush town. The workers are joined into the pop-rush town and promptly used to rush archers, say. Pop-rushing causes unhappiness, but if the pop-rush town is kept at size=1, a person could gain say 20 archers this way, without investing the shields it actually takes to get those units, and without suffering any unhappiness effects. It is considered an exploit.

The issue lately with pop-rushing is, does the rule apply just to units? Obviously the game allows pop-rushing. For victory conditions like culture 100k, by the end of the game players get in a situation where they have say 200 workers with nothing to do. Joining them to cities and drafting them is one use for them, disbanding the conscripts to rush culture buildings. Or the workers could be joined to say, 50 different towns in communism, and used to rush culture like crazy. A player could plan on having lots of extra workers to augment this effect.

So is this second example allowed? That's the question. Is it an exploit, or is it a strategy? Is it cheating, or is it using what the game provides to achieve a victory? The tension is between allowing a particularly powerful tecnique vs. requiring everyone to just waste all those workers that they created fair and sqare.

EDIT: IMHO, the pop-rushing rule is clearly about military units, not buildings.

 

[Quintillus]

Just to be clear, here is the text from the gotm.civfanatics.net, Code of Conduct section:

Pop-rushing
In despotism and communism it is possible to use cities purely for unit rush building. Workers can be added to such a city and then the city can then use them to rush build units. This is disallowed, so do not create these kind of cities. Pop rushing one or two regular citizens to finish a building or to build a unit is within the rules and the spirit of the game. What is against the rules is joining workers to cities for the purpose of pop rushing.

WillowBrook: it specifically mentions using Joined Workers for pop-rushing Units as being completely unacceptable, but allows a limited pop-rush of "regular citizens" to finish a building or build a unit. Unlimited Joining of Workers and then pop-rushing of anything, units or buildings, is unacceptable based on what I'm reading.

What does unlimited mean? When this rule was implemented, at least one person was found to have cities of size1 with just a specialist in them; they'd been used to pop-rush down to complete unhappiness, and with a Barracks in them, you could Join workers and use Short-rushing to generate a Veteran unit every turn and transfer the unhappiness hit to this city, so virtually no effect.

My interpretation is that units and buildings can be pop-rushed and workers can be joined to a city that pop-rushes as long as the resulting unhappiness is small enough that some citizens are still working in the city's tiles and you don't pop-rush more than the original "pre-joined" population of the city. It's impossible to say under this scenario whether "regular citizens" or Joined Workers were used to pop-rush, and they are effectively interchangeable. I don't think there's any problem with Joining workers to a city, whether it's pop-rushed earlier or not, if that city never pop-rushes again; it has already taken the unhappiness so the player is not avoiding that effect of pop-rushing, which is the intent behind this rule.

Another possible use of Workers is to Join them to a city and then Draft a defensive unit (Rifleman, Infantry, etc.), potentially to use for disbanding somewhere else. The rule doesn't mention Drafting, but since a unit is generated, I'd feel doing this violates the rule, IMO. This has a much broader potential impact, since Drafting is available under all governments, and the staff should address this specifically, especially with the focus on 100K games recently.

(edited to discuss regular citizens)

Would joining non-foreign workers to border cities to rush temples (or, more generally, cultural buildings) to avoid flipping problems be acceptable or not?

I did this once in the current GOTM before I reread the regulations and saw the pop-rushing part. As it reads, joining for pop-rushing units cannot be done, but it says nothing about buildings.

In this particular case, the cities could always support all the citizens joined with food, and did not starve after the rushing due to unhappiness.

As this is the current GOTM I won't post any more details. A save is available for the mods upon request; although it is a decent time after the rushing, the city is still feeling the unhappiness effects.

I haven't finished or turned in the game yet.

 

[civ_steve]

Pop-Rushing is a standard feature of the game (under certain governments), and so is Joining Workers.

This pop-rush rule was put in place because some players were making tons of Workers from cities with lots of excess food and shields, then joining them to other cities that were size 1 cities and popping a unit. These size1 cities were so unhappy that they could only sustain a single Specialist, but here they were building units frequently with no additional penalty from the poprush; this is exploitive so the rule was made to sanction this practice.

If the city is a growing thriving city I do not believe you would be violating the spirit of the pop-rush rule if you join a worker and then pop-rush. The city will suffer the unhappiness caused by the pop-rush and eventually overcome it. Under no circumstance may you join a worker to a size 1 specialist city and then pop-rush; this is clearly the case that the pop-rush rule is targetting.