Everything you wanted to know about corruption

[E_T]

so the formula for Nopt will be:

Nopt=Rounddown (Gf * Diff * (1+ (0.25 * Ni) * OPT)

Where:
Opt = number of Optimal Cities in the Editor
Diff = Difficulty due to level of play
Gf - 1.10 if Dem or Rep, 1.00 all others
Ni = number of corruption Improvements & WLKD (waste only) & if Commercial (1.29f & PWT only). i.e. with 1.29f & Commercial and a courthouse Ni would be 1+1=2

Example:
Emporor level: Diff = 0.8; Opt = 32; non-commercial Civ, Democratic Gov, and a courthouse in the city; the MOCP would be 28

Nopt = rounddown (1.10 * 0.8 * 1.25 * 32) = 28

Right?

E_T

[alexman]

Close, but here's what I think:

Nopt = Rounddown(Diff * (1+ (0.25 * Ni) + Gf) * OPT)

Where:
Opt = number of Optimal Cities in the Editor
Diff = Difficulty due to level of play
Gf - 0.10 if Dem or Rep, 0.0 all others
Ni = number of corruption Improvements & WLKD (waste only) & if Commercial (1.29f & PWT only). i.e. with 1.29f & Commercial and a courthouse Ni would be 1+1=2

Example:
Emperor level: Diff = 0.8; Opt = 32; non-commercial Civ, Democratic Gov, and a courthouse in the city; the MOCP would be 34

Nopt = rounddown (0.8 * 1.35 * 32) = 34

[E_T]

Thanks, I've added that to my spread sheet.

E_T

[alexman]

While investigating Communism for the AU mod, I discovered two corrections to the formula:

1) Connection to the capital reduces distance corruption, (not total corruption) by 15%.

2) The FP in Communism increases the OCN by 25%, not 100%. (The 100% increase was quoted by someone from Firaxis, and I previously just took it for granted without having verified it myself).

I updated the initial post and the calculator.

[Theseus]

Is #1 just for the Commies?

Or do I remember wrong... you're saying that capitol connection was previously believe to reduce total corruption (which is what I sort of remembered), and that in fact it's just for distance?

[DaveMcW]

Originally posted by alexman
2) The FP in Communism increases the OCN by 25%, not 100%. (The 100% increase was quoted by someone from Firaxis, and I previously just took it for granted without having verified it myself).

Whoa! That would explain why communist corruption is so bad.

[alexman]

Originally posted by Theseus
Is #1 just for the Commies?

It's for everyone, including Commies. Not a big deal. OTOH the FP commie deal is big.

[SuperSlinky]

Sorry if this has been discussed extensively already (I regret that I only have one life to give to reading these forums), but what are ye clever corruption gurus' opinions on modding the game to reduce the (IMO) excessive emphasis on corruption in Civ III?

Of course, one obvious way is to increase the OCN to the maximum, but this has a few consequences including:

1) making it impossible to build the FP

2) reducing the effect of the commercial trait.

The first one doesn't bother me too much, because I consider the FP to be a strange idea, or at least it is strangely named (why not call it 'colonial government' or something similar?). The AI is also notorious for botching FP placement so badly it is almost useless. The second is more serious, but I suppose we could compensate them by giving them a third free starting tech or something.

Another question I have is where exactly does the handy corruption slider fit into all of this? I assume that we would just multiply the total distance and city# corruption results by whatever percentage we choose. I understand that this can still result in 95% corruption because the total corrupion can be well over 100%. Alexman, have you considered incorporating this into the corruption calculator?

So if I were to set the optimal # of cities to 999 and set the corruption slider to 70%, would there be any unintended consequences? So in a worst corruption scenario, according to the calculator, if I was in the late game trying to conquer the world under monarchy, on a large map, and I capture a city that is as far away as possible from my palace (65 x 65 squares), I would have a corruption rate of 95%. Rush building a courthouse would have a discernable effect, bringing it down to ~85%. Rushing a second building would bring it down to ~45%, actually making the city useful and productive. This seems reasonable to me, bearing in mind that I want to chop some serious wood as far as corruption. Any comments?

[alexman]

Originally posted by SuperSlinky
So if I were to set the optimal # of cities to 999 and set the corruption slider to 70%, would there be any unintended consequences?

Well, it depends what you mean by "unintended".
If it is intended to make the AI want to grab every bit of available land, to make the Commercial trait useless, to eliminate any corruption difference between Monarchy and Republic, to remove the FP from the game, to greatly reduce the importance of WLTKD, courthouses, and police stations, to speed up the timeline from the extra income, and to increase tedium from managing huge empires, then I guess these changes would be fine.

But if you ask me, corruption in the game is even more fine as it is.

BTW, no plans for incorporating the corruption slider in the calculator because its effect is very simple: just multiply the total corruption by that percentage (before the 95% cap).

[SuperSlinky]

OK, that's how I thought the corruption slider worked. And you may be right that eliminating # of city corruption may be too extreme and I think I will just set the corruption slider to 50% and increase the optimal # of cities, but not to a huge number. What I have done after looking at the stock numbers in the editor is to normalize the optimal number of cities to about the same number of cites per square as a small map. IOW, a small map has 360 squares and an optimal number of cites of 12, so I just divided each map area by 300 to get a new optimal number of cities. This gives optimal city numbers of 12, 20, 32, 56, and 84. I then increased the tech rate for all of the map sizes that I increased the optimal # of cities for and that progression now goes: 160, 240, 300, 400, 500. This should address most the concerns you expressed in your reply.

[Nor Me]

I've done some tests and found a few slight discrepancies with your formula. In most cases these are insignificant but until you've quantified an insignificant effect, you do not know that it will remain so. For Communism, the differences are bigger.

I've not tested this in Republic or Despotism but in Monarchy and Democracy building the FP adds 10% to the OCN.

Courthouses,Police Stations, WLHD and the commercial trait have their OCN increase rounded i.e. the OCN modified by difficulty level divided by 4 is rounded down to an integer. Note that this is the only such rounding.

In Communism:

1) There is a free 20% increase to the OCN like the 10% increase in Republic and Democracy

2) The FP increases the OCN by 20%.

3) The effects of Courthouses, Police Stations and the Commercial trait are multiplied by 2/5. So if the OCN modified by difficulty level is divisible by 4, they increase it by 10%. (Come to think of it, I forgot to test WLHD.)

4) If the number of cities is odd, round it down to the previous even number.(Is there such a word a predecessive? There should be.)

5) If number of cities is very high something like than the OCN-modified-by-difficulty-level squared or six times it, the increase in corruption for each extra city is doubled like if Ncity>Nopt in a non-communist goverment. (This at least doesn't occur in practice.)


Multiple FPs do give multiple bonuses.

I think that's it. All done with PTW v1.14f.

[alexman]

Good work, Nor Me!
Thank you.
It seems that we are finally close to an exact formula.
I am very impressed at your exact numbers.

Originally posted by Nor Me
building the FP adds 10% to the OCN.

Are you sure about this? Were you adding the FP to a city which was farther away from the capital than the city you were investigating? If so, that's a good find.

Courthouses,Police Stations, WLHD and the commercial trait have their OCN increase rounded i.e. the OCN modified by difficulty level divided by 4 is rounded down to an integer. Note that this is the only such rounding.

Agreed, I saw the same thing.

In Communism:

1) There is a free 20% increase to the OCN like the 10% increase in Republic and Democracy

Good to know. Was this in addition to the 80% reduction in number-of-cities corruption compared to the non-communist formula?

2) The FP increases the OCN by 20%.

Actually, I found something similar, but decided that an increase similar to courthouses was more probable. 20% it is then!

3) The effects of Courthouses, Police Stations and the Commercial trait are multiplied by 2/5. So if the OCN modified by difficulty level is divisible by 4, they increase it by 10%. (Come to think of it, I forgot to test WLHD.)

How about the modification to flat corruption in communism? This is still the same as it is for distance corruption in other covernments, right?

4) If the number of cities is odd, round it down to the previous even number.

Don't even get me started on this...

5) If number of cities is very high something like than the OCN-modified-by-difficulty-level squared or six times it, the increase in corruption for each extra city is doubled like if Ncity>Nopt in a non-communist goverment. (This at least doesn't occur in practice.)

If you say so!

I'll update the calculator with your contributions. Thanks again, Nor me.

[Nor Me]

Originally posted by alexman Are you sure about this? Were you adding the FP to a city which was farther away from the capital than the city you were investigating? If so, that's a good find.

Actually, I tried this with the Palace and the FP in the same city. I know that some aspects of civ appear to have been put there just to be difficult but I hope that this really is general.

Originally posted by alexman Good to know. Was this in addition to the 80% reduction in number-of-cities corruption compared to the non-communist formula?

Which 80% reduction? I was just using the 0.1 multiple. With this 1 FP gives a 20% bonus, 2 FPs give 40% and so no sixths and sevenths are needed.

Originally posted by alexman How about the modification to flat corruption in communism? This is still the same as it is for distance corruption in other covernments, right?

Yes. But Commercial in particular is weakened from your formula (although this makes sense). If you want unneccesarily precise numbers try putting 0.282 instead of 0.3 in the formula for for distance corruption in Communism. For 1 city (Ncity is rounded down to 0.), this gave me results accurate to 1 corruption.

[alexman]

Originally posted by Nor Me

Actually, I tried this with the Palace and the FP in the same city. I know that some aspects of civ appear to have been put there just to be difficult but I hope that this really is general.

Another possibility is that the FP city does not count against the city's rank, not that it adds 10% to the OCN. At least that's what I thought when I first did my tests. I did not test this extensively though, and your theory seems more likely.

Which 80% reduction? I was just using the 0.1 multiple.

Yes, we're talking about the same thing. The 0.1 multiple for communism compared to the 0.5 multiple for other governments is a 80% reduction.

Anyway, I updated the initial post and the calculator to incorporate your findings. Especially the FP effects could prove useful in finding a way to balance communism. Thanks again.

[UnityScoutChopper]

*bump*

It looks like we may all be stuck with one core in Conquests, so we will need to squeeze everything from it we can get.

I'm not sure if it's worth it to update the thread yet -- it seems like FP resets distance corruption to zero around itself while not affecting rank corruption (which can easily itself exceed 100% even in the FP city itself, thus theoretically leading to the strange outcomes we've been seeing), but I think we're still in the wait-and-see stage.

I'm starting to get the feeling that palace jumps are still a good idea -- you can only have one core, and you want that core to be as far from the shore as possible, so that there can be as many cities as possible whose distance corruption is low enough to keep their total corruption under about 120%... right?

I'm kind of curious if "top tier" players will try to keep under the OCN with the new FP behavior, or on the contrary ICS and milk specialists to no end figuring it's hopeless to even try to fight corruption, or something inbetween.

With the FP bug in Vanilla/PTW, "Ncity" (from the first-post formula) was very low for a wide area around the FP if your city density was high enough around the FP and low enough around the Palace... if I understand correctly. Thus rank corruption -- the real killer for the cores of big empires, again, if I understand correctly -- remained low in a wide area around the FP. Not to mention the use of RCP around the palace to reduce ranks.

Now we're just stuck with one set of RCP-unenhanced ranks.

Incidentally... anybody who can tell me what the OCN is for a commercial civ on a huge map, in a Republic, and having the FP, and which rank numbers bring a given city past 33, 66, and 99 percent "rank-alone" corruption on Conquests wins a cookie from me... I'm too lazy to look it up myself. :-)

USC