Confusing Waste issue in captured cities

[Nihilanth]

This may be in the manual, but my copy suffered a tragic catastrophic existance failure (long story), and the only place i can seem to find coherant information on this game is on message boards. My question goes a little something like this:

I've found many times throughout the game that cities i've captured are NEVER able to export more than one shield per turn. Cities would have a -completely- happy population producing 20-30 shields....with all but one wasted. The cities have courthouses in them and military units garrisoned there, everyone is generally happy, i encountered this problem in democracy and communism (i switched around to see if that was the problem) under war-time and normalcy. I beleive I have ruled out corruption and unhappiness as causes for this monumental waste, having a large number of cities that take 60 turns to build a temple is highly frustrating. Why, do you suppose, this happens? Has this happened to anyone else? What else can cause this degree of waste?

[Gramphos]

Are the cities connected to the trade network?

Are they on their own continent?

Have you built the forbidden palace?

[Nihilanth]

The map is pangeic (if that's in fact a word), so it's all the same continent. All the cities are connected by rails, harbors, airports, or a combination thereof. I have built the forbidden palace, but it's just occured to me that I built it wastefully close to my palace. I knew that corruption increases with distance from the capitol/forbidden palace, but looking around this message board, the possability has just occured to me that just building a courthouse might not be enough if the city is far enough away.

Am i correct in assuming that for a city to be productive at all, it must be within a certain distance from a palace? I thought communism would change that, but the cities remained unproductive.


I came up with a funny way around it though. I had all my fully-improved cities pumping out modern armors in 2 turns, sending them down the rails to the unproductive cities, and then just disbanding them for shields (30 apeice). Me and my friend were both playing, and it gave rise to comments like:

"Say, how many tanks does it take to build a cathedral, anyway?"

or (when i didn't notice the AI under my control was making boats needlessly)

"You know, it's just occured to me that we're melting down boats to make tanks, and then melting those down to make courthouses. wtf!"

[Gramphos]

How many cities do you have?

What is the mapsize?

What difficulty level?

[Nihilanth]

The difficulty mode is on cheiftan (I know, im a wuss, im starting the higher difficulty modes after work tomorrow), the map size is normal, and i had pretty much most of the map dominated

[Gramphos]

Well then I guess that you have filled the corruption to max. That many cities aren't good in Civ3.

[napalm010]

There is a max # of cities u can have before severe corruption and waste (1 shield/1gold produced) kicks in. The number is optimal # of cities in the editor, on the map size page. This number is also affected by the optimal % of cities on the editor difficulity level page.

Once u have reached this # of cities, the 1shield/1 gold corruption and waste kick in. Building courthouses/ police stations will only give maybe 1-2 shiled/ gold improvement in the waste/ corruption. Forbidden palace will help also. Only if within 6-10 tiles of the city (varies due to map size).