The problem of Super Corruption!

[nationalist]

Corruption in this game is implemented horrendously! I can understand why a recently conquered city would be corrupt and unproductive, but why would a city founded by its own citizens be completely useless simply because it is a long way from the capital? It doesn't make sense, especially under Democracy. Why wouldn't a democracy be able to keep control over its own citizens just because the city is far away from the capital? Honolulu is a long way from D.C., but it isn't crippled by corruption!

My biggest complaint is super corruption. I define super corruption as being the point where a city loses everything to corruption exept for 1 shield and 1 commerce, and that corruption can't be relieved through the building of courthouses and other improvements. After you grow to a certain point, every new city becomes super corrupt and you can't do a thing about it. This takes the fun out of expansion because, once that point is reached ( it can be reached fairly quickly) any new city becomes a resource sucking liability. In my opinion, cities founded by your own citizens should never become super corrupt under any government except Despotism, and even then it should only effect cities that are very far away from the capital. My solution to the corruption problem is to tie most of corruption's effects to the nationalities of the citizens of the city.

The lower the percentage of your citizens that reside in a city is, the more corrupt that city should be. If a city is composed of less than 20% of your own nationality, and has a large population of a nationality that you are at war with (even if they aren't resisting), then and only then should a city become Super Corrupt. During peace time, a city that is populated by a large percentage of other nationalities should be more corrupt than a city at the same distance made up of mostly your own nationality. The corruption caused by the other nationalities should lessen after time due to assimilation, eventually disappearing.

Distance should affect corruption in ancient governments and ancient times, but not as much as it does now. As for the modern governments, Communism should have mild distance related corruption. Democracy should not lose production in cities that are dominated by its own nationality ( when 80% or more of the population of the city belongs to the civilization's nationality), no matter how far away the city is from the captial. The super corruption that now exists (even in modern democracies!) is ridiculous! It takes alot of the fun away from the game for me, especially because there is nothing that can be done about it short of changing the game rules yourself! I think that the game should be balanced and playable as is, without manually changing the rules. What do others think?

[Jaybe]

Personally, I think you are just not adjusting to the "reality" of the game, regardless of how "unrealistic" the model may appear. The culture model is also an "unrealistic" way to define borders. It's just the best we have yet.

If you accept that not all your cities will be productive, but may just be adding a little culture and expanding your borders, denying real estate to your opponents, you might enjoy the game more. A game is all it is, after all.

BTW, in the Editor, Improvements and Wonders tab, the Palace is defined as "Center of Empire." What would happen if you unchecked that (and also with Forbidden Palace)??? Would there be no corruption attenuation from distance to capital if there was NO "Center of Empire"??????

JB

[PaulNAdhe]

I've read Firaxians explain the decision to make corruption so prominent as their way to make the empires smaller and force the players to be more diplomatic with the AI civs.

It seems a ridiculous waste of programming resouces when the AI will declare war without any provocation. I don't mind going to war, it's kind'a fun.

But, when the declared goal of Firaxis was to force diplomacy and then they set the trigger for war so low, it seems schizophrenic to me.

[notyoueither]

Re: The problem of Super Corruption!

Originally posted by nationalist
Distance should affect corruption in ancient governments and ancient times, but not as much as it does now. As for the modern governments, Communism should have mild distance related corruption. Democracy should not lose production in cities that are dominated by its own nationality ( when 80% or more of the population of the city belongs to the civilization's nationality), no matter how far away the city is from the captial. The super corruption that now exists (even in modern democracies!) is ridiculous! It takes alot of the fun away from the game for me, especially because there is nothing that can be done about it short of changing the game rules yourself! I think that the game should be balanced and playable as is, without manually changing the rules. What do others think?

Aye.

[Zachriel]

No one historically has been able to force a large empire to be productive. The U.S. represents only a very small proportion of the world's inhabited surface. Whenever we tried to enforce our rule over other countries, we have not been anymore successful than others of the past.

Every large empire has had to deal with the problem of corruption and with the problem of maintaining control. How much real production did the Soviets ever get from Kazakstan? Instead, to build anything, they had to spend cash. Eventually, they lost control of their empire.

[MonsterMan]

I'm playing a game on Monarch level, 250x250 archipelago map with eleven opponents -- and no #city corruption. I set the optimal number of cities to 175. I'm in the industrial age, and although I found iron, horses, saltpeter and coal within my empire, it's not a walk in the park.

Not long ago I went over to Communism and changed my economy to war-time. What an excellent opportunity for the AI to start a world war against me :-) I'm impressed, and it really invigorated my game.

On an interesting note, I set up a kind-of trap for one of my rival civs; I decided on one of my cities on our shared continent (my empire was on another) to be my second capital, and it held Shakespear's Theater and Forbidden Palace. I'm not kidding, the Persians amassed probably *75* land units to bring down that city. I kept the save game if anyone wants to check it out.

The trap worked, and I disintegrated what must have been 90% of the Persians offensive units, and I'm on my way to conquering their whole empire. Sometimes I love this game.

[Marquis de Sodaq]

Is increasing the "optimal # cities" in the editor the best/only way to do this? Some of the real-world maps that have been made are excellent, but too huge. I happen to like the idea of some corruption (or even a lot), but yes, the 99% corrupt cities are irksome.

What would answer nationalist's concern could be a tech trigger. Once you discover something, say electronics, corruption would reduce in the more distant cities. That way, the ancient era cities would be corrupt (which seems very realistic to me - squeezing gold out of a distant city was difficult work for any ancient regime), but more modern times would reduce it significantly.

[Ceasar David]

I'm on my second game - and i'm in trouble. I have a continent to myself & considered my civ quite safe. However, i've just been invaded and due to super corruption, i cant fight back. My empires huge - stretching my supplylines, but everything i have close to the front line will take 20 turns just for a basic unit. The enemy are raiding my cities and just raising them to the ground. In short, i'm screwed.

[Murtin]

Originally posted by Jaybe

If you accept that not all your cities will be productive, but may just be adding a little culture and expanding your borders, denying real estate to your opponents, you might enjoy the game more. A game is all it is, after all.

Yeah, that's one effect of corruption that I really like: That you have to decide whether to build that distant city just to deny your opponents the use of that territory, knowing full well that the city will always cost you a lot more than it will produce.

[Kassiopeia]

I wonder if a connection via a harbour or an airport differs in corruption. It would be much easier if the level of corruption would decrease like this:
1. No connection whatsoever to palace. Rampant corruption.
2. Harbour connection or 2. Railroad connection. Reduced corruption.
3. Airport connection. Low corruption.

So the corruption would be decreased by a connection of traffic, but would be further decreased when there are more ways to travel between the cities.

[MonsterMan]

Originally posted by Ceasar David
I'm on my second game - and i'm in trouble. I have a continent to myself & considered my civ quite safe. However, i've just been invaded and due to super corruption, i cant fight back. My empires huge - stretching my supplylines, but everything i have close to the front line will take 20 turns just for a basic unit. The enemy are raiding my cities and just raising them to the ground. In short, i'm screwed.

Nah.
1. Quit the game.
2. Open the editor and load civ3mod.bic
3. Select your world size and change the optimal # of cities to something more to your liking.
4. Boot up Civilization and whoopi

Better than starting a new game, I think.

[nationalist]

Zach,

I agree with you that maintaining a vast empire should be more dificult than maintaining a small one. However, my point is that historically much of the difficulty in maintaining a large empire (British empire, USSR, etc.) comes from the fact that many of the people that are in the empire aren't from the empire's nationality. For example, Indians resented being ruled by the British, and Kazaks resented being ruled by Russians. This resentment would lead to corruption. ( I define corruption as being the loss of potential shields to inefficiency and commerce to theft. The other nationalities wouldn't care as much about the empire, so they wouldn't work as hard as the main nationality, causing less shields to be produced than there should be. They would also be more likely to skim off the top, reducing the empire's benefit in taxes (commerce)) But if the city was founded and populated solely by the civilization's own nationality, and is under a democratic government,then it should be a productive part of the empire, no matter where in the world the city is located. My solution to the empire problem takes his into account. The more nationalities exsist in a ciy, the more corruption there is likely to be until they are assimilated. I just don't think that super corruption is a good way to represent the difficulty in running an empire, because no city could ever be that corrupt without the army coming to ensure production.

[cavebear]

Super-corruption is the cancer of Civ3. To my mind (and I am a builder of Civs, not a militarist - it's called "Civilization", not "War"), the utter and built-in inability to overcome corruption is the single worst feature of the game. And to think that they did it *deliberately*! If they thought their idea would force more diplomacy, then their AI program is a complete and utter failure.

Now, please understand, I accept the presence of warfare as a wholly legitimate part of the game. War is real, it happens. But, considering that they were trying to make diplomacy, culture, and trade more important, they failed.

Sure, you can play this as a war game, it works that way. But there are lots of war games out there, and I won't buy those that are advertised as such (no moral objection, they just don't interest me).

Civ3 fails because the expressed focus of the game is at odds with the reality of the playing of it. The corruption problem is a major part of that failure.

[SlowwHand]

No. The real point of the game is located between War People and Diplo People.
War People don't build Civs, they build horses.
Diplo People would avoid war.

The point of the game is to build a successful Civ, while fighting off predators.
Real world concept.
My opinion.

[RickBlaine]

I have not been playing much Civ lately and the primary reason is corruption. IMO, all the arguments whether this is realistic modeling or not are irrelevant--Civ3 is utterly unrealistic in virtually all of its aspects; it is an abtract strategy game vaguely modeled on world history, not a simulation. (If you want a simulation, try something like EUII, which I am playing around with now, It seems like a great game, but oh boy, what a steep learning curve.)

To me, the question is not whether it is realistic, but whether the game is fun or not, and corruption leaches much of the fun right out of it for me. This starts early on, well before I hit the editable default limit on optimal cities. My playstyle in Civ has always been development oriented, I rarely fight unless forced to (or when I have opened a large tech lead on my opponents). The Civ3 AI forces me to expand even faster than I did in Civ2, but when I start placing cities a dozen or more tiles from my capital (I play on large maps), I run right into corruption. It is most frustrating to build a factory on a worked tile only to see it add yet another red shield. And even more frustating for the charmless Domestic Advisor to tell me to build the Forbidden City, when it is 100+ turns in any location where it would do any good.