Change in great leaders to fight corruption?

[CyranoJoel]

I have no idea whether this has been suggested elsewhere but ...

Instead of having great leaders assist in building improvements/wonders in a single turn, why can't great leaders be changed to work as corruption inhibitors - sort of like using them as governors for the far-flung reaches of one's empire. They would function like roving Forbidden Palaces, so that as your empire changes you can move them to better locations and help fight corruption on a wider scale.

If this were to happen, the rate at which great leaders are created might need to be increased a bit (from 1-2/civ/game to 3-5/civ/game), though. Great leaders could also expire ...

The great leaders could still be used to form armies ... but if they are used in such a manner, they could not also function as governors.

The idea came to me based on the following - if by introducing a great leader to a city, you can help build an improvement that would take 200 turns of game time (200+ years) in just 1 turn (2 years during the 1800's), just think how well that leader could motivate the people to be productive over a longer period of time.

Just a thought.

I'm addicted to the game even though I am frustrated to no end by the seemingly crippling levels of corruption in my outpost cities (courthouse, police stations, WLTKDs ... I'm not technical enough to want to use the editor to tweak anything for fear I will do irreparable harm and need to reinstall). I have no idea whether this is even a viable option for a patch but I figured I'd throw in my 2 cents worth ...

[AHO]

I think that's a good idea. Probably historically accurate too.

Please, Firaxis, listen to what everyone is saying. We don't mind the corruption, we're just looking for solutions.

[BanastreTa]

IMHO, great leaders are simply too rare a phenomenon to counteract against a very pervasive problem.

Corruption wasn't a huge issue of mine when I first played the game, but it gets more and more vexing. There is something wrong when you have a few cities that aren't especially far from the capital that are just crippled outposts. There is something wrong when I play a building-friendly civilization like Babylon and all of my fringe cities are taking hundreds or thousands of years to build libraries.

I agree corruption should be a limiting factor on empires. This is particularly true in the ancient era. It is still too much as is, even under those circumstances though. The only reason there should be a possibility of 99% corruption even in the ancient era is when there is a distant colony on some far-off continent.

What is needed is a more widespread and historically accurate solution, particularly for the modern era. Perhaps there should be a minor wonder, a building, centralized economy," "distributed government" or "federalism", that can be built anywhere on a continent and drastically reduce corruption. Maybe even an expensive, dead end tech advance or two would do this.

The forbidden palace isn't good enough--you have to build it far away from your capital, which means that corruption makes it very difficult to build in the first place. Furthermore, if you build it on the same continent as your palace, you can forget any sort of meaningful intercontinental colonization.

BT