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As a French person I feel like it's my duty to explain strikes to you. - AdrienIer |
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Adventure 14: Compromise's Report
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Compromise Wrote:By the way, I haven't noticed it in other reports. (Maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention.) Did anyone else found that ice-locked city south of Delhi with 4 icy hills and 2 seafood resources? I founded there. With the two fish and the ice hills mined it turned out to be one of my best military production centers. T-hawk Wrote:I agree -- how in the world did you build that many horse archers without whipping? And what happens if Rome builds a spearman, never mind Praetorians? Compromise Wrote:Whipping is good for two things: converting food or population to hammers and doing it quickly. In fact, I tend to think of whipping as roughly equal to a mined grassland hill. Over 10 turns, you get 30H and some food. With the mine, you try to break even on food. With the whip, you need other tiles to pull in extra food to grow your pop back. The biggest advantage of whipping is that you can get production out of tiles where F+H=5 or 6 rather than F+H=4 which is the early mine limit. Amazing - looks like we've reached the point where whipping is so prevalent, the notion of "building some mines" for production surprises people.  I'd like to congratulate Compromise on an excellent game, with a bold plan well-conceived and executed. (And some people need to put down the whip, seriously.  Whipping EVERYTHING was never really where the balance of this game was supposed to go.)
Sullla Wrote:Amazing - looks like we've reached the point where whipping is so prevalent, the notion of "building some mines" for production surprises people.True enough, we should "build" more. Compromise gave a good outline of why whipping is powerful sometimes and not other times, a balance of food and hammers so to speak. But the thing is Compromise (as he pointed out) had to wait for those horse archers to be built, with whipping you don't wait near as long and as we all know in the early game an extra turn here and there really adds up. The other part of this is the city regrowth, with a food resource (or two) that city regrows so fast  ! Just keep whipping, and whipping and whipping until you are only working that food resources, then stop and just wow!! An huge stack of units in no time, a city or two like this and well forget about. This advantage of time is just so hard to resist and not using it in competitive games is a disadvantage. I would really welcome some games with a no whipping variant, lets put down the whips folks and take up the pickaxe.I am curious to see Blake's AI changes that will have the AI whipping in the new Warlords patch.
On League of Legends I am "BertrandDeHorn"
Sullla Wrote:(And some people need to put down the whip, seriously. But consider the granary factor. With a granary, the whip converts ~15 food to 30 hammers. That's definitely more efficient than working mines. And don't forget that the whip bug still exists in vanilla; with Org Rel or a forge, you can often convert that 15 food to 60 hammers, which is a spectacular payoff. Finally, a smart player can manage whip applications to always kill two population at once while incurring only one 10-turn happiness penalty, which will wear off by the time the city grows back. So there's virtually no downside to whipping, and a huge upside payoff. Atlas Wrote:The other part of this is the city regrowth, with a food resource (or two) that city regrows so fast T-hawk Wrote:But consider the granary factor. With a granary, the whip converts ~15 food to 30 hammers. That's definitely more efficient than working mines. And don't forget that the whip bug still exists in vanilla; with Org Rel or a forge, you can often convert that 15 food to 60 hammers, which is a spectacular payoff. Finally, a smart player can manage whip applications to always kill two population at once while incurring only one 10-turn happiness penalty, which will wear off by the time the city grows back. So there's virtually no downside to whipping, and a huge upside payoff. (My emphasis above.) If these posts are true (and recent RB events seem to indicate they are), it's probably going to result in less and less time spent for me playing Civ4. I simply refuse to whip my cities endlessly, to the point where building something naturally becomes a "variant." That was never supposed to be the point of whipping, or Slavery civic. If that's where we are now, then game balance is in bad, bad shape. High food surplus plus liberal whipping plus cottages = uber strat, whee!  Blake's AI improvements certainly result in better performance, but he achieves this by having the AI serial whip and draft its cities in the same fashion. At the risk of speculation, it appears that for players to compete with the new AI, they are going to have to do even MORE whipping to keep up, turning the game into a competition of who can slave their cities better. That's already a major reason why I've been turned off of MP; now we get to have that fun in SP too. Umm, yay? I'd rather finish in the middle of the pack in RB events than head down the endless whipping route. The same kind of issue happened with Civ3 eventually as well (I refused to ICS the game to death), so I guess I'm just a little saddened to see the same thing starting to happen with Civ4. Slavery has a real place in the game, being used to pop out emergency troops or get some use out of low-production fishing cities, but endless serial whipping is bad bad bad for game balance. I'd like to see the community adopt some sensible restrictions in this area, but I guess that's just a pipe dream. I'm sorry to rain on Compromise's parade in his game thread here, but I was not expecting to find REGULAR production being viewed as a variant by so many people. 
Well I think this very game proves that mining is better at producing troops than slavery. I was whipping out cats and HAs, working mainly food and cottages, but compromise massively outproduced me on that front with mines. So maybe us happy-whippers need to take a lesson from this game
Can I really be in the minority with trying to grow my cities? Most of my whipping is all food cities. As in those fishing villages that will never have a lot of shields. I don't whip the core a lot except where I have grown miserable people and can kill multiple mad people as they have zero production value.
I'm seeing a lot of double (and triple) screenshots in the report - is this deliberate or a mistake of some type? One really stands out - the persian stack that induced the peace treaty - the text implied a screen shot but the one shown was the one of the wounded immortals.
I have finally decided to put down some cash and register a website. It is www.ruffhi.com. Now I remain free to move the hosting options without having to change the name of the site.
(October 22nd, 2014, 10:52)Caledorn Wrote: And ruff is officially banned from playing in my games as a reward for ruining my big surprise by posting silly and correct theories in the PB18 tech thread.
Whipping is generally best for cities that have low natural hammers or that are stuck working Forests to try and get production. If all your population is working mines or better and you don't have a huge food surplus, it's not really efficient to whip unless it is an emergency since you lose the mine output for the time it takes the population/happiness cap to grow back.
Cottages also have poor synergy with whipping since you not only lose cottage growth time but the cottages don't add food/hammers during the regrowth period. Delhi and the southern icy fish cities would have benefitted from slavery, but I think it would have been a mistake to whip at the city sites on the T which only had one seafood resource to work with. I must admit to having mixed feelings about the AI whipping more as well. |
