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Quote:
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I mass-produce workers, send them to the frontier and have the workers rejoin the 1-2 pop cities that are there. Thus I build up the frontier more quickly.
Is that accurate?
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Not quite. I don't think anyone has any problem with rushing the population growth of border towns.
"Pop-rush" is being used to mean sacrificing population for shields. It's avaiable under Despotism and Communism and it allows a _lot_ of units to be built very quickly. A few reasons why some think it's an exploit:
-In the early game, population growth is much more rapid than production, making the strategy so effective that a player basically _must_ pop-rush if his opponent is going to do it. The potential to force one-dimensional gameplay is considered by many to be a Bad Thing (TM).
-The AI doesn't seem to use pop-rush very much. Certainly not as much as a dedicated human can. This leads a lot of people to believe that the penalty for pop-rushing is "supposed to be" more severe than it is.
-The unhappiness which is supposed to counter-balance the effectiveness of pop-rushing is not effective. This is because a temple and/or any MPs in your town create _guaranteed_ content citizens. Even though oppression unhappiness should be causing 35 citizens to be unhappy (for example), if you have a temple and two MPs you get 3 content citizens. This is enough (2 extra) to pop-rush almost any unit or building in the Ancient Age. Also, when you're done pop-rushing and want to switch to a normal production model, you can always abandond the city and rebuild it, effectively trading all the accumulated unhappiness for a temporary population reduction of 1.
-Population growth is not subject to corruption. Therefore in far-away border towns that would normally produce only a single shield, you can pop-rush your way to happiness and furtune, whereas no other tactic is very effective.
