topped all of my AF's (2 strains) in my current grow thread.
It's my soecond round of experiments, the first round I topped some, fimmed some and left some natural.
I didn't like fimming, it seemed to cause the most delay whilst the plants worked out what was going on, and wasn't very predicatable.
My best result came from topping, creating a nice uniform plant with 6 fat main tops at an equal height, which resulted in a better yield than the plants I left alone.
I think what you need to bare in mind is the strain, (grow them first naturally and see what kind of structure they have, Indica/Sativa dominance etc, and also how long their veg/pre-flower stage is before growth haults and it's switched to bud production)
Second point is the timing of the topping, Obviously you can top too late and won't reap the real benefits of it. Or also too early IMO can stunt development.
If you have just a few plants, Or plenty of time to play I'd say LST would be the kindest option to your plants. Another reason I went with topping as it was a very time effective way of training, one snip at the 5th or 6th node, then whip off the branches at the first node and job done more or less. (my af tent is just for fun at the moment, most of my time is devoted to my photo tents, so they dont get much of a look in)
One thing I liked about topping is it's fairly predictable what the plant is going to do, allowing a nice regimented grow.
I haven't had it happen for some time, but on the earlier AF's there was a trait that would pop up where plants would top themselves.. was interesting to see.
