Massive corruption

[bowman]

I'm in the middle of a game on a huge map. Looooonnnggg. I'm the Americans, and as a result of taking over the greeks and the iroquois, I have crap full of territory on one of the continents. I know that the farther away from the capital city or the forbidden city, the greater the corruption. At this point, it's really pissing me off. I mean, 23 out of 26 shields lost to corruption is pretty ridiculous. I've built both police stations and courthouses and I'm in a democracy. Is there anything else I can do to stop this?

Chris

[zulu9812]

The Forbidden Palace is buildable once you have 5 cities. If you did this staight away your Place and Forbidden Palace are probably quite close together, so you might want to think about rebuilding your palace somewhere else.

Besides, if corruption is ruining a city's production, factories, plants and mines all increase production. Having a large city population, whilst creating more corruption, does increase that city's labourforce and thus also increases production.

The happiness of your citizens might also affect production - unhappy citizens don't do anything (as far as I know), so try building temples, cathedrals and colosseums.

[MrWhereItsAt]

This is a problem that many consider unresolved in the game. With the latest patch (1.21), there is an option (maybe in the editor) to set corruption at a particular difficulty level to a percentage of the corruption built in. Haven't tried it yet, but it may work for you.

All the luck in the world to you!

[caliskier]

I have had the same problem and have looked all over the place for answers. The answer is to do what you alread have done, and/or to change the number of cities for world size in the editor, and/or to change the corruption level in the editor. If you are a Civ 1 or 2 player and used to building as many cities as possible to over run the map, you will find defult corruption levels to be rather frustrating.

[zulu9812]

Guys - corruption should be part of the game. It makes thing more realistic - countries today do suffer from corruption. It also forces you to build certain city improvements which some players might not bother with and just concentrate on building up military, but that's not the point of civ3.

Anyway, the corruption levels are scalable depending on what difficulty level you're playing on, not just with the new patch either - with previous patches you could change the number of optimum cities before corruption really sets in.

[MrWhereItsAt]

But that doesn't seem to affect things too much, zulu9812. I have fiddled with the editor option of optimum number of cities, but this has not much affected corruption. Hopefully the scalable factor in the new patch will amend this.

[zulu9812]

Actually, my main point was that I was glad corruption was part of the game - not all cities should be production powerhouses. It's the same with other strategy games: in Shogun Total War, not every province has as much production-power. It's the same in civ3.

However, this problem arises because there is only one type of production. This means that if a city is 'good' at producing military units, then it's good at producing wonders, tile improvements, research, etc. It might be better if this was split into categories, so that corruption might affect the building of miliatry units only.

This would encourage players to use some cities as their main military factories, just like in real life, whilst still allowing other cities the ability to build cathedrals, etc.

Still, I suppose you're correct in the sense that you should have more control over corruption in the editor.

[MrWhereItsAt]

I certainly like your ideas, zulu.

At the risk of seeming like a whiny little *****, I like the Civ 2 sort of corruption better.

[realpolitic]

Re: Massive corruption

Originally posted by bowman
I'm in the middle of a game on a huge map. Looooonnnggg. I'm the Americans, and as a result of taking over the greeks and the iroquois, I have crap full of territory on one of the continents. I know that the farther away from the capital city or the forbidden city, the greater the corruption. At this point, it's really pissing me off. I mean, 23 out of 26 shields lost to corruption is pretty ridiculous. I've built both police stations and courthouses and I'm in a democracy. Is there anything else I can do to stop this?

Chris

I don't know if the new patches allow this, but I sell cities that are too corrupt. The other civs sometimes pay a fortune for a city thats far from their capital. Its especially satisfying when another distant civ invades their ungarrisoned city. I get the first country's goodwill and my competitors start hating each other.

[Lung]

I haven't bought Civ3 yet, and this was one of the big turn-offs for me. The figures quoted (23 out of 26 shields, for example) is absurd in the extreme. I can't even imagine a modern Mexican or Russian city with rampant crime and corruption having such an incredulous proportion of corruption as depicted in Civ3. In pure mathematical terms, if you have to pay a corrupt councillor 10,000 bucks to approve a 100,000 construction, does that constitute 100% corruption for that one instance, or 10%? In reality, it is 10% of production that is lost to corruption, NOT 100%, so how is it possible for any civ to have 90% corruption?

I suspect that Firaxis have simply made it so high in order to make Civ3 difficult at the harder levels, which begs the question - "why not just make the AI better instead of making Civ3 unreasonably difficult and a total pain-in-the-arse?"

The other thing that gets me is - why do they make Democracy so goddamned difficult? Isn't it the best form of government ever made? In Civ2 i generally play Communism as Democracy is so bloody difficult, and unreasonably so Why did they have to do so in Civ3 as well? Maybe they're just a bunch of communists

[zulu9812]

That's a good point - at higher difficulty levels, the AI just get more hidden 'cheats' rather than proper strategies.

[bowman]

This was my first game trying it out, so I played it on chieftain, not the higher levels. It is just ridiculous. Unfortunately, I have to deal with it until the mac 1.21f patch comes out to use the wonderful corruption slider.

[Comrade Yuri]

Whatever the difficulty is, the corruption almost makes me cry. (not actually, but still it is so veeeeery frustrating) Some of you talk about 90% corruption or 23 out of 26 but my corruption's about that I get 1 science 1 shield and 1 gold out of each city, no more whatever the production rates...

[Panag]

Originally posted by Comrade Yuri
Whatever the difficulty is, the corruption almost makes me cry. (not actually, but still it is so veeeeery frustrating) Some of you talk about 90% corruption or 23 out of 26 but my corruption's about that I get 1 science 1 shield and 1 gold out of each city, no more whatever the production rates...

hi ,

comrade , we feel sorry , we shall say prayers for you , .....
okay , what about buying a police station and a courthouse , and later anything that helps to get you more shields , like powerplant and manufacturingplant , etc , .....????

have a nice day ,

P.S. , ....in real life its a bit like that to

[Yurt]

What really bothers me is that Courthouses and Police Stations aren't good enough... often I spend 400+ gold on a police station in my 1 production city, and when it's done the city still has 1 production. And the city doesn't even have to be far away. In one situation, the city was about 1/2 of the height of a normal sized map away from my capital, and a bit closer to the Forbidden City. I was also in a democracy. Courthouses should eliminate 50% of corruption, with police stations cleaning up 75% (maybe if both are built, it should be a total of 85-90%). As it is, they only do about 20% each. It's really frustrating when I'm trying to build defensive units in conquered areas.