C3C Corruption: Whoa!!!

[Niessuh]

Originally posted by Doc Tsiolkovski

...and yes, I see no need to buy C3C before this is fixed.

Agreed. Thinking every turn about not placing your cities on equal distance. It's a nightmare


Arnelo's solution is the best, just do the medium between equidistant cities

[heysewa]

So I was using the RCP exploit by accident, mostly because I was playing hub and spoke. It just seemed the most efficient way to run an empire. Also I noted that cities with roads to the capitol were less corrupt than those without. Was true in PTW at least. All roads lead to Rome theory. I think there should be some benefit to RCP (slight); like averaging the ranks and rounding down to nearest whole number. As for forbidden Palaces any formula with multiplication in it is going to cause problems.

[E_T]

I'm still reading the first page of this thread, but it's a game stopper for me at this point in time.

What they should have done, to remove the RCP was to not use Integer values for the city distances. This way, you only have a couple of "sweet" spots that you can place cities to have the same distance.

IMHO, It's a bad programming attempt to remove the results from previous bad programming.

E_T

[alva]

Bah, as long as they fix it soon enough, there are plenty of new things to play around with and get yourself used too IMO.
i DO expect it to be fixed, let me state that very clearly !! but I can get along for a couple of weeks? without it.
The (only) thing I find annoying about it, is that I'm abit weary to start up a PBEM game, in case a patch wouldn't be compatable with the current version and thus turn those played turns into a waste of time.

[E_T]

this would be very easy to Implement, atleast in psudocode:

Step 1: create a table for city corruption figures. Input city names and turn bullt

Table 1
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| City | Dist to Palace | Dist to FP | turn built | is Palace | is FP | closer Palace | closer FP | Same |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Step 2: figure the distance of each city.
a: using Pathagorian Math (use the SQRT(X^2 + Y^2)) with the X-axis as the NE-SW line through the capitol and the Y-axis as the NW-SE line through the capitol (or FP). Figure the distance to both and put into table.
b: flag that it it either closer to Palace, closer to FP or same
Step 3: Flag FP & Palace (is Palace/FP)
Step 4: Parse through table, sorting the cities to 2 separate tables with just distance, turn built, is palace/FP and same flag.

Table 2 & 3
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
| City | Dist | turn built | is Palace/FP | Same | Rank| City Culture |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Step 5: Bubble sort both tables, by the distance, keeping Palace/FP at the top
Step 6: Parse through table, looking for cities that have the same distance.
a: Bubble sort sort the ones that are they same distance by turn built.
b: IF more than 1 have same turn built, then also sort by city culture.
c: If more than 1 have same turn built AND same city culture, then sort by Random Number.
Step 6: Assign Rank from 0 to whatever.
Step 7: Parse through both tables, looking for same flag.
a: IF a city is same, toss from the table that has the highest rank.
b: IF rank on both tables is the same, then toss from the table that had the lowest Palace/FP culture.
Final Step: Assign Distance and Rank to each city for later corruption calculations.


What this would do, is to have the ranking of each city, first by being Palace or FP centric, then by distance, then by age, then by culture and possibly then by a random factor. Also, if a city is the same distance between both Palace & FP, it initially gets ranked as both, then the better rank wins.

This routine would be run every time a city is built, the FP is built, The Palace is moved or a city is gained or lost somehow. The distance and rank figures would be used for each city.

The distances are floating point values, the Rank is Integer.

E_T

[WarpStorm]

That could be tightened up a bit, but I like it.

[zorbop]

let me get this strait, the fp is bad, secret police is bad and my cities cannot be the same difference from the capital?
what were they thinking?

[Vlado]

Hmmm, I wonder if I ever would have noticed since I often don't build the FP. (no leaders, trying in a totally corrupt city taking 200 turns... ) So I hope they don't fix it since then maybe even I can have a chance in multiplayer...

[WarpStorm]

Originally posted by zorbop
let me get this strait, the fp is bad, secret police is bad and my cities cannot be the same difference from the capital?
what were they thinking?

It wasn't intentional, it was a bug.

[notyoueither]

Why did they shut down the beta prior to the final release version(s)?

[steven8r]

Originally posted by Anun Ik Oba
I'm wondering, is there any interim fix that we could mod into the game, or is this stuff pretty hard-coded?

One interim fix would be to flag the 'Reduces Corruption' for city improvements. That could at least help some.

[Saint Marcus]

Why did they shut down the beta prior to the final release version(s)?

do you have to ask?

[vmxa1]

Originally posted by notyoueither
Why did they shut down the beta prior to the final release version(s)?

Money of course, but at some point you have to go forth. I would say they did a fair job and a lot better than most.

[stonewall]

Originally posted by vmxa1

Money of course, but at some point you have to go forth. I would say they did a fair job and a lot better than most.

I agree that at some point they just have to go forward, but it does not make much sense to me to do all of the work on something outside of the beta.

[nbarclay]

Dominae, I see what you're saying about how from a competitive perspective, good FP placement gives the human player a huge advantage pre-Conquests. But some of us enjoy Civ 3 more from an empire building perspective than because we want the AI to play us as close a game as possible. (Consider Arrian's "Ultimate Power" games.) From an empire-building perspective, the ability to benefit from good palace/FP placement is extremely important because without it, conquering additional territory starts to become almost completely worthless long before the domination threshold is reached.

Granted, the new specialists and the boosted power of scientists and tax collectors provide a way to get some value out of totally corrupt cities. But to me, something doesn't feel right about having huge numbers of cities where the only viable strategy is to make everyone farmers and specialists. So while I wouldn't mind too terribly accepting some increase in corruption as a price for the improved specialists (not that I'd exactly enjoy even that), I absolutely hate to see the ability to benefit from solid two-core empires taken away. Even if the FP bug/change helped make the AIs more competitive, I'd still regard it as a problem that needs fixed.

Regarding the RCP situation, the worst thing about the change in my view is that it increases the potential for a city on bad terrain to be a liability rather than an asset. The question, "If I build a city here, will it produce enough to be worth displacing more distant cities by a rank?" was already an annoying one when faced with desert or tundra near the capital under the original rules. Now, not only does building a mostly desert or tundra city near the capital hurt the rank of every city further away, but it hurts the rank of cities the same distance from the capital without even letting the poor city take over the displaced rank. (By the way, if I understand what’s going on with the FP situation correctly, the FP change adds still another penalty to low-value cities near the capital.)

At best, the RCP "fix" accomplishes little more than to replace one set of rules through which adjusting city placement to fit an "unnatural" quirk in the rules provides an advantage with another. As others have alluded to, replacing one set of winners and losers with another doesn't really fix anything. Arnelos’s idea of averaging the penalty is in line with what I’d already been thinking would be the ideal way to resolve the situation if Firaxis wanted to do something about it (I've had a couple statistics classes myself ), although I was never annoyed enough with the RCP bug to raise a fuss about it.

Nathan