Hulver's site || Comments || Along the way, I closed my eyes

depends a lot but by alprazolam (4.00 / 1) #15 Thu Sep 14, 2006 at 03:51:04 PM EST

Early I try to get an obelisk in although with Mao I've been getting writing fast enough almost to go straight for libraries. Granaries are very very useful for whipping, but I haven't mastered that strategy yet and haven't used it until recently. I used to build aqueducts but whipping keeps the pop under the health limit most of the time so it's not really a necessary building. Libraries and monasteries both give culture and science but possibly more importantly they allow you specialists, which is also not a strategy I've mastered. I always build courthouses and forges asap in pretty much every city.

It really depends a lot on the leader and strategy you intend to use. The civfanatics forums has a disturbing amount of strategy and philosophy laid out for you, some for n00bs, some for wannabe pros.

I have not had to specialize cities from the very beginning to win up until now, but I had a tendency to do that over time anyway. Cities with a lot of flood plains are good for great people farms or cottage spam; commerce or science cities. Capitals can be either production or commerce or science cities, especially with bureaucracy. Production cities with the heroic epic will be best used as pure military production cities. And so on.

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What is whipping by cam (2.00 / 0) #17 Thu Sep 14, 2006 at 04:13:40 PM EST

It is obvious I am going to be playing Civ4 tonight to try some of this stuff out.

cam
Freedom, liberty, equity and an Australian Republic
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: pop whipping aka "the whip" by alprazolam (2.00 / 0) #18 Thu Sep 14, 2006 at 04:39:17 PM EST

that's the term for sacrificing population for production under slavery.
it's almost a whole other world the way they use it, you're basically treating food resources as production by trading pop/workers for hammers. you can sacrifice two pop for some bizzarely high number of hammers, i don't really understand the mechanics fully but you can get up to 60 hammers for one pop and that seems to scale up linearly so that you can get nearly 120 for 2. there's a penalty for whipping on the turn you start building something but otherwise it seems to be grossly overpowered to some degree, although you build up a happiness penalty over time if you don't let the initial penalty go away every time you whip.
i highly suggest you start a new game and concentrate on using slavery and the whip and don't worry too much about winning and losing, it's worthwhile to master that strategy. i mean hell you can win on immortal with it without setting up some gay dual map with lame conditions that guarantee your victory (not criticizing you for dual but some people win by the set up and that's lame imo). so far the trick seems to be to let the penalty wear off in between whips and get the timing right to get the max use out of each whip. another thing is if you whip say an axeman, you want to have another queued up behind him so the overflow hammers will be put to his production, if you cross genre/type from unit to building you lose the overflow.

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