My Issue with Pop Rushing

[pcasey]

For those of you who don't know what it is, pop rushing is a tactic you can use in Despotism or Communism where you cash in population points for shields to hurry production.

Its useful in the early game because population tends to grow fast in tiny cities so you can pop rush a temple and library in every city far faster than you could by building them naturally.

It really comes into its own again in late game communist wars though, so much so that if there's every a CIV III MP, I'm sure communist rushes will be the only viable strategy.

On the surface, pop rushing seems balanced enough. You get 40 shields for the first population point you kill off, and 20 for evey later one.

If you grow a population point every 15 turns, and that population point would be producing 3 shields per turn on a RR mined plain, then you're losing 45 long term shields for 40 short term shields.

The huge problem I have though, is that pop rushing isn't affected by corruption.

I can build a size 25 city so far away from my capital that its in the famous 1 shield, 1 commerce mode for eternity.

Then I can pop rush an army there that I could never, ever build. Since that population unit wasn't going to be doing anything productive anyway, I'm getting 40 shields of production at zero cost.

In essence, if you pop rush, corruption is a non issue. Its a way to completely negate one of the game's limiting factors on growth and expansion (a factor I personally hate, but that's just me).

Yes, you can gold rush as well, but ultimately you have to get the gold from somewhere and distant cities don't produce income. They do, however, produce people.

A globe spanning pop rushing empire is just as efficient as a pop rushing empire in a nice figure eight around a palance and FP.

Anyway, I don't know that I have a solution except to force pop rushing to abide by the same corruption rules as organic production, but then you'd have to do the same thing for gold rushing as well e.g. 47,000 gold for a temple or something.

Basically, I hate corruption, I think it ruins the fun of the game. Because pop rushing dodges the corruption bullet, corruption makes pop rushing the only viable powergaming strategy.

So I guess I dont' really hate pop rushing. I hate corruption. Corruption makes me pop rush.

[vmxa1]

I can not disagree with what you say. I would have liked to see a method of taming corruption a bit. Say 24 shields yields no worst than 6 shields. Then you could make pop rushing painful to discourage it. Maybe making the citizens in that town lose their benefit form temples and the like for 15 turns for the first one and then really up it for the second one, regardless of how long it was between times.

[jbrians]

Originally posted by pcasey
For those of you who don't know what it is, pop rushing is a tactic you can use in Despotism or Communism where you cash in population points for shields to hurry production.

Its useful in the early game because population tends to grow fast in tiny cities so you can pop rush a temple and library in every city far faster than you could by building them naturally.

You can turn down corruption in the editor now, can't you? Like on the difficulty customize tab or something? You should do that if you still think it's too high. I personally think corruption is a good idea, though pre-patch it was too much.

As far as pop-rushing goes; doesn't this make the other citizens unhappy for a long time? So there is more to the trade-off? I wonder, if you pop-rush a city down to 1 population, do 2nd and 3rd populations become unhappy immediatly upon birth, or does it only affect the 1st person?
-Brian

[vmxa1]

I use it very sparingly so I can not say for sure. I have not seen any real affect in despot. everyone seems to be content as if nothing happened.

[karlmarx9001]

I think pop-rushing in corrupt cities needs to be filtered through the normal corruption channels; as it is, it's just silly to have a city *completely* useless under Monarchy/Republic/Democracy, yet about one-quarter as effective as a normal city (no research, but full production) if it has decent food production.

Including corruption, but capping the loss at say, 90% when poprushing would be good.

[Sirian]

You're right, poprushing under communist does completely circumvent the corruption limits. It's a flaw in the design, plain and simple. What's the solution? I don't know.

So far, I've resisted the temptation to switch to communist. What could you produce of value out of those captured cities other than rushed military units? I've always had enough military by that point not to need such help, and prefer to keep chugging away at getting more of a tech lead. The other thing is that if you starve captured cities down to one, and regrow them with your own citizens (longevity really helps) it ups your score a lot, and revolts won't happen at all unless the city had massive culture to begin with (like, multiple wonders). So you can hold on to them. I've got two domination wins under my belt now, and that means conquering and CONTROLLING enemy cities. Using them for poprush could still work for that, I presume, but you can get some gold out of them by growing them to a decent size, then turning all surplus pop into taxmen. Let them make a temple at one shield per turn, buy it off later with the taxmen profits.

The corruption penalty of ALL production lost is unrealistic, but it actually works both ways, doesn't it? Or is the AI not penalized by this factor? It seems to me that the AI's expanding all over the place actually weaken themselves, thanks to corruption. If not for that, wouldn't their expansionistic ways make for a more winning move for them? As it stands, most of their far flung colonies are useless to them and easily captured.


- Sirian

[Sevorak]

The biggest problem with pop rushing isn't really its late game effects. No one really complains about late-game communist pop-rushing as a terribly broken effect. Late game, the unhappiness effects of pop-rushing actually do add up and you might suffer the consequences for it.

Compare and contrast, however, Vel's base pairing strat, which uses that critical 40 shield first citizen to pop rush a swordsman every time the city grows, with a single garrison unit keeping the sole citizen content. When the rush is over, the city is simply disbanded into a worker and your potential 800 (or whatever) turns of unhappiness penalty is just gone into thin air. That, I think, is the biggest pop-rushing issue that needs to be addressed.

-Sev

[absimiliard]

I think that would be easy to fix Sev. (If I were Firaxis that is)

Simply have empire-wide unhappiness from pop-rushing. So if you rush, rather than one city having 20 turns of one unhappy person have 20 cities have one unhappy person for one turn, or 4 cities for 5 turns, etc.

This would eliminate the base-pairing strategy's ability to eliminate unhappiness by disbanding without impairing the effectiveness of pop-rushing.

I'm not actually upset with pop-rushing at this point myself. I'm not as convinced as I once was that it's over-powered. In fact I'm using it progressively less and less as I play more games. These days I'm pretty much rushing only a Temple & Granary, everything else is just getting built. My reason is that I hate losing pop. It's a permanent reduction in my production capacity that I'm loathe to accept. The time-value of a rushed Granary is too high to ignore though, and a rushed Temple is a must on my borders. Anything else though . . . I'd rather have the pop.

[barefootbadass]

Originally posted by absimiliard
Simply have empire-wide unhappiness from pop-rushing. So if you rush, rather than one city having 20 turns of one unhappy person have 20 cities have one unhappy person for one turn, or 4 cities for 5 turns, etc.

Something along the lines of 'war weariness' might work, say for each pop killed in a turn(empire wide) you have a small cumulative chance of starting a short 2 turn war weariness like effect.

Anyway, I pop rush more than ever now, since we can't IFE and corruption has changed little in early game. Also, I haven't tried this 'pairing' strategy, I usually just use cities with high food and a granary to crank out a pike or horseman every turn two or three turns.

[Peets]

I switch to comunism mostly in my games...
It's a way to deal with this highly corruption.
I use the cities to pop rush when I only get 1 shields in it.
I only do it a few times and then put them on "wealth" to get a little more gold. After a while the city gets angry, then wealth pops in

[Sevorak]

absimiliard,

The problem with your fix is that it would involve excessive micro, selecting which cities would get unhappiness and for how long. If it was implemented without a selection for which cities, no one would ever pop rush anything since there's too much of the possibility that a critical city gets an unhappy citizen and throws it into disorder for a turn or something like that. What if someone wants to pop rush a cathedral, requiring five or so citizens, let's say. That's 100 total turns of unhappiness, and with random selection there are a lot of bad things that could happen with unhappy citizens assigned to the wrong cities. I mean, imagine settling a city and finding out next turn that because of a pop rush back home, every citizen there's going to be unhappy for some time, or alternatively, having a random city in your core go into disorder and melt down its nuclear power plant. Programming to avoid that kind of thing, I think, would make this fix a lot less easy than it might appear.

I don't think the disbanding is really the issue as opposed to the stunning productivity you can get out of it in the early game. I hate losing pop too, but sometimes the deal is just too good...even leaving base pairing aside, temples and libraries with the Babs, for example...one citizen each, and the temple nullifies its own rush-unhappiness...culture bomb in a very big way.

-Sev

[Sauron07]

Don't forget that post-patch there is a cost to pop-rushing under communism because of the flat tax corruption rates. Communism now has 40% corruption empire wide once the ideal number of cities is exceeded, and therefore only very small cities will be producing only 1 shield. It is still a powerful tool, but not overpowered in my opinion, especially considering the fact that a republic or demo. can rush troops with cash without jeapordizing their production base or causing unhappiness. The addition of police stations reducing corruption further increases the ability of the "peacetime" gov'ts to mount a formidable defense. I think you will be surprised how powerful turtling will become if mp comes out due to the defensive advantages of terrain and especially the bonuse the defender gets in terms of using railroads within his own territory which the attacked cant use.

I also agree that poprushing is overpowered at lower levels, especially in sp when the comp. doesnt use it. My recommendation for tweaking pop-rushing is to apply a law of diminishing returns - reduce the number of shields you get each time you pop rush until eventually it provides little or no benefit to rush in that city(ie. 40,30,20,10, and then you're workers go on strike/revolt =o shields from further rushing). This wouldnt completely destroy the power of city pairing, but would make you consider the value of wasting a settler in order to rush maybe 4 units.

Another way to "fix" rushbuilding under despotism is to only allow improvements to be rushbuilt but not units, or to make any units which are rushed start as conscripts(even if barracks is present to represent the coerced nature of their enlistment).

Lastly, and I just thought of this would be to have rushbuilding cost culture points for each citizen killed. This is somewhat realisitic imo, as why would other civilizations look up to your culture just because you have neat temples if those temples were constructed w/ slave labor and killing of innocents?

[absimiliard]

Well, the point was to make pop-rushing less palatable.

But I think barefootbadass has a better idea. Tie pop-rushing into war-weariness. We don't like that, so pop-rushing gets less palatable. It's empire-wide so city-pairing won't work, since even after disbanding your pop-rushing city you'll still have the weariness to deal with.

It's not nice. But that's kind of your point isn't it?

Disclaimer: The author of this article does not represent his own viewpoints, he merely suggests alternatives. Personally he feel pop-rushing is fine as it is.

[pcasey]

If I play an aggressive enough pop-rush swarm game, war weariness is a non issue.

I'll just keep all cities size 4 or under and garrison them all with 4 units.

I can slam my cities closer together just like the old civ i checkerboard pattern. COrruption will be absurd, but it doesn't matter to me, I'm pop rushing everything anyway and corruption doesn't matter.

Pop rushing + checkerboarding = the old civ I pre corruption checkerboard. Basically unbeatable, and basically no fun.

[ranald]

The more I think about it, the more I think you're onto
something. I've noticed recently that, since I discovered
pop-rushing under despotism, that I get off to a *much*
faster start in the early game.

I haven't tried to abuse pop-rushing yet, I've just used it
as a boost to get me into my "normal" development curve
faster... but it does seem extremely abusable.

It seems like the only thing that can save you from an early
game pop-rush powered rush is doing the same thing
yourself.

[jbrians]

Originally posted by absimiliard
I think that would be easy to fix Sev. (If I were Firaxis that is)

Simply have empire-wide unhappiness from pop-rushing. So if you rush, rather than one city having 20 turns of one unhappy person have 20 cities have one unhappy person for one turn, or 4 cities for 5 turns, etc.

Very good idea. Word would get around that people are being enslaved next door. We could be next!
-Brian