why does corruption actually suck?

[Darth Sidious]

the reason for me is that it greatly imbalances starting positions.

If you start in the middle of a continent, with grassland / plains in every direction of you, you have a reasonable area in which you can bulid cities that are close to your capital and will be usefull. If you however meet ocean, desert or jungle in multiple directions from your capital, you only build a few usefull cities.

On top of that comes the importance of the special resources that are much more important now than in other civs.

This causes huge imbalances in starting positions which sucks ass. A balanced start is very important. Maybe less then in a multiplayer game like starcraft (in starcraft, good players do not play maps were there is a > like 3% difference in starts.) but still important.
And if there ever will be a way to play multiplayer, it will only be able to play this on pre made balanced map

[player1]

Quite correct!

Also,
most irritating part is that buildings don't help much (at lest after some critical distance).

BUILDINGS SHOULD ALWAYS HELP, REGARDLESS OF DISTANCE.

And that PRODUCTION WASTE (corruption) is to big.

[Adagio]

I can't agree here. The imbalance starting positions makes the game great. If you e.g. start on some small island away from everyone else the game will become harder, and harder games (to a certain point) makes the game better. In MP it could be a problem, but not in SP!!!

[FrantzX]

I found that the number of cities setting for corruption for each map size to a touch or two too low. I bumped them up a bit, but not to high to make it rediculious. I adjusted to percent of opitimal cities for each difficulty level, also. It's a fine line between crippling and nonexistance corruption.