I just got my copy of Conquests, and finished some tests to see if anything related to corruption has changed. Did it ever! :eek:


FP rank bug is fixed. Cities closer to the FP than to the Palace no longer use the Palace's set of cities to determine OCN corruption. :goodjob:
There is now a penalty instead of a bonus for RCP. They 'fixed' RCP by giving equidistant cities the worst rank, instead of the best, as was the case in PTW. So now you get penalized for building two or more cities the same distance from the Palace or FP. :wallbash: Note that distances are still rounded down, so a city at distance 4 is considered the same distance as a city at 4.5, and they would get penalized for their RCP positioning.
The FP increases the rank of all your cities. More specifically, when you build a FP far from your capital, all cities near your capital have their corruption increased because the rank of all cities is increased to 2(r-1), where r is their old rank without the FP. So building a FP may or may not increase your overall corruption, because you get a whole new ring of cities where the rank starts from 1, but the rank within each ring goes up by increments of 2 instead of increments of 1. Building a FP (and SPHQ) in Communism always increases your corruption. :lol:


Let us pray for a patch now... ;)

:eek: This is wicked

Bugger. :(

I am truely gutted.

Terrible :sad:

Man, you'd think that developers would know how to implement an easy fix for this problem. :rolleyes:

oh bleah! Thanks alexman for the heads up on this.

Yes, the FP bug is awfull.
In my current go at the Rise of Rome conquest scenario I build FP in Thessalonica, and consequently Carthage (at size 6 with courthouse) went from 7 shields out of 17 lost, to 15 shields out of 17 lost. All of my cities in Spain also faced similar severe corruption increases :rolleyes:

Personally I always found the outrage over RCP strange - old way of calculating corruption was working just fine imho.

I'm sure it'll be fixed soon.

An official statement would be nice... :rolleyes:

Strange it haven't been solved differently?:confused:
Still waiting for the game and now also for a patch or mod it apears.
I would suggest a maximum corruption/waste (clean city - no improvements) lvl in the range of 75-85%(depending on government) for civs with a much to high ocn. courthouse would then help about 10% (same for a police station) also depending on government.
I hate having cities of pop ~ 12 with 1 shield and 1 com.
Hope they feel ashamed - though it doesn't help me.

Originally posted by warpstorm
I'm sure it'll be fixed soon.

I doubt they will change the corruption/waste problem much in future patches, mainly cause the problem has been there as long as I can remember (but a also have weird requests). Should have fixed it by now I guess.
Nevermind ... let's see what they will come op with. That's the exciting part. I'm having all very positive thoughts about this fix now.;)

This corruption issue is just ridiculuous. It's time they fixed it "good". Under despotism, corruption is surely a problem . Under democracy, it has NOTHING to do with distance from ANYTHING. why don't they understand this.

I'd recommend just setting corrpution in EACH CITY REGARDLESS OF LOCATION!!! by a simple formula:

Despotism: 80% corruption
Monarchy: 70% corruption
Republic: 60% corruption
Communism: 50% corruption
Democracy: 25% corruption

I have no clue about facism or the others. Comments welcome. The "distance" thing is just ludicrous. San Francisco has NO MORE corruption that Washington DC, not even close!

Come on guys, it's time to fix this...

That's what Communal Corruption is for.

Besides, could you say some fronteir town in the wild west was equally corrupt as Washington DC at that time? Think about that. Democracy was not always so corruption free. If there wasn't lawlessness and corruption on frontier towns, there wouldn't be any westerns.

Think of Democracy of all time, not just the global world we live in.

Originally posted by RedwoodTree
This corruption issue is just ridiculuous. It's time they fixed it "good". Under despotism, corruption is surely a problem . Under democracy, it has NOTHING to do with distance from ANYTHING. why don't they understand this.

I'd recommend just setting corrpution in EACH CITY REGARDLESS OF LOCATION!!! by a simple formula:

Despotism: 80% corruption
Monarchy: 70% corruption
Republic: 60% corruption
Communism: 50% corruption
Democracy: 25% corruption

I have no clue about facism or the others. Comments welcome. The "distance" thing is just ludicrous. San Francisco has NO MORE corruption that Washington DC, not even close!

Come on guys, it's time to fix this...

One could argue that San Francisco has a FP of sorts.

But, let's not threadjack this bug report.

I think a better corruption model would be one based on the transit time of a hypothetical government bureaucrat as well as the number of cities and form of government. By transit time, I am assuming a movement foot unit going from the capital or FP to the city by the best possible means. If there are roads, he'd get there faster, he'd have to hop a boat to get to overseas cities (using the fastest transport available), airports once available.

Damn! I was planning on giving Communism a burl in my first (epic) game as soon as I finally got my copy.
Now I have to wait for a patch, even before I've got the game :mad:
Oh well, at least I won't be hanging on the release day anymore (the game's, that is).
Poorly considered 'fix' Firaxis: Smashing bugs with sledghammers is fun, huh?

Originally posted by Aks K

I doubt they will change the corruption/waste problem much in future patches, mainly cause the problem has been there as long as I can remember (but a also have weird requests). Should have fixed it by now I guess.


What problem? The fact that it is higher than you like? That isn't a problem as far as Firaxis is concerned, they like it that way. Seriously. They gave a lot of tools to fight corruption in the game; worst case you can tweak it in the editor to suit your tastes (the default level suits theirs).

Back on topic. They are looking into this bug.

Warpstorm is right. I am most excited by policemen -- a great improvement. This really isn't a bug but a design choice. But thanks for the heads up because it is a strategy issue.

Originally posted by alexman
Building a FP (and SPHQ) in Communism always increases your corruption. :lol:
I wouldn't say this was a 'design choice'. :rolleyes:

i also was looking for to use commies but i guess i have to wait for the patch . this must been overlooked when they tried to fix the RCP exploit . I'm sure they will fix this soon since it make Police HQ worthless. I amazed you found this bug so soon. Why wasn't you on the Beta list?

Ah, this is awful. :( A pity you weren't a part of the beta testers team (although I guess the beta testers already prevented lots of bugs entering the final version).

Great job that you found this bug. :thumbsup:

RCP penalty... doomsday payback?

Now we rot in hell for having used that RCP sin...:(

Hope this gets fixed soon.:)

Originally posted by warpstorm

What problem? The fact that it is higher than you like? That isn't a problem as far as Firaxis is concerned, they like it that way. Seriously. They gave a lot of tools to fight corruption in the game; worst case you can tweak it in the editor to suit your tastes (the default level suits theirs).


No harm ment. I don't mind it being high. I would just like there would be a purpose with building courthouses, ect or having police specialists(the tools should work better without moding).
I think FP should lower the rank or at least leave it unchanged.

Originally posted by warpstorm

I think a better corruption model would be one based on the transit time of a hypothetical government bureaucrat as well as the number of cities and form of government. By transit time, I am assuming a movement foot unit going from the capital or FP to the city by the best possible means. If there are roads, he'd get there faster, he'd have to hop a boat to get to overseas cities (using the fastest transport available), airports once available.


Like in ctp. Sounds great. That game wasn't that good balanced, but many excellent ideas.

Thanks to you, alexman, for again looking into corruption issues so soon.:goodjob:

Originally posted by alexman
1 FP rank bug is fixed.
2 There is now a penalty instead of a bonus for RCP.
3 The FP increases the rank of all your cities.

Little editing (no changes in your post, alexman)

1. Good :D
2: It should be the average instead of the lowest.
3. From a designers point of view it makes sense. The city with FP would get rank 1 and all cities nearest the Palace would get rank: (r + 1). The FP acts a the closest city to the palace pushing the other cities 1 higher in rank.

I don't know how the OCN works but:
If FP doubles it or increases it by a fair amount(which i must do) and the change #2 to average.
Then #3 is not a bug.

Is the OCN linked separately to the palace and FP or to the total number of cities?

Well, that is sure a fix - a fix with minimal thoughts.

Now it seems you have to
(1) Avoid RCP at all cost.
(2) Don't bother building FP, it doesn't help.

Also, with AI using RCP accidently most of the time, we see a weaker AI.

By the way, Willem discovered that the Secret Police HQ works as a second FP even when you're not in Communism. Sigh.

Originally posted by alexman
By the way, Willem discovered that the Secret Police HQ works as a second FP even when you're not in Communism. Sigh.

Oh dear! :(

Whichever formula or system is implemented, building a FP should never increase the corruption in any city.

Originally posted by alexman
By the way, Willem discovered that the Secret Police HQ works as a second FP even when you're not in Communism. Sigh.
:lol: I can just see someone who hasn't read this playing C3C, sets up an RCP empire, thinks 'wow, this corruption is bad, better build an FP. Damn now its worse, oh well, I always wanted to try Communism, the corruption can't get much worse, and I can build that new 2nd FP. Aargh, now all my cities are failures, at least I can switch to Democracy and turn that damn Secret Police HQ off . . .'

Kind of strange this has been overlooked in the beta test...

I wonder what the developers were thinking. I hope they will tell us if this is what they wanted or that they will fix it with a patch ASAP!

Originally posted by ERIKK
Kind of strange this has been overlooked in the beta test...


My understanding is that the whole RCP fix was done after the beta testing was finished.

But government-specific Small Wonders (like the SPHQ) have been broken since PTW, even if there were none in the unmodded game.

:borg: The FP and SPHQ additions to corruption were intentional! You build them in the "vain" attempt to reduce corruption, and it backfires. :cry:

Then comes alexman! :thanx:

I am still on my first major epic game. I have gone commie, and long ago built the SPHQ. OTOH, I am so far ahead I am gifting gold and techs in the hope I can get some air/anti-air experience.

Hopefully, about the time I finish this game (I'll draw it out as long as I can), the corruption bug patch will be available.

My 2 cents:

I never used RCP; heard rumors about it, but never took the time to figure out what all the fuss was about until I started to read that RCP was fixed with C3C.

So now I, who never made use of the exploit, must deal with the very serious fallout from a poor attempt to fix the problem.

That said, what's all the fuss about RCPP in the first place? Seem to me that if you want to take the time to carefully organize the placement of cities in your empire to minimize corruption, then more power to you...

By the way, Willem discovered that the Secret Police HQ works as a second FP even when you're not in Communism. Sigh.

This is a bug, I assume, and not a design choice?

I hope its not a choice. That would be WAY overpowered. Three cores! :eek:

Originally posted by alexman

FP rank bug is fixed.
There is now a penalty instead of a bonus for RCP.
The FP increases the rank of all your cities.
...

By the way, Willem discovered that the Secret Police HQ works as a second FP even when you're not in Communism. Sigh.

The first point is of course good news. But the others! The cure is worse than the disease. It is now more important than ever to understand RCP, in order to NOT use it. And once again the FP might as well be considered to be out of the game.

I find this set of bugs very upsetting. I cannot begin to understand or sympathize with programming errors like these leaving a developer's desk. In the development worlds I live in it simply would not happen - errors of this sort are completely avoidable.

If they can't fix it right (and there's reason to be concerned about that now :( ) I'd prefer them to just put it back the way it was.

Firaxis: If/when you next fix this, please do it carefully. Please do not succumb to the temptation to just use the average rank for all cities at the same distance from a core. That could still foul things up, e.g.: Suppose OCN is 10, the player has 6 cities closer than distance 6, and has 10 cities at distance 6. If the average rank is used for those 10 cities, they'll all be treated as being at distance 11, which will result in them all being treated as past OCN, which will foul things up. Possible good fixes might be arbitrarily ranking the cities sequentially and using that, or (a bit better I think) averaging their final calculated (pre-improvement and WLTKD) corruption after arbitrarily ranking them and calculating individual (pre-improvement and WLTKD) corruptions based on the arbitrary rankings.

I've been out of Civ for a while, so help PLEASE ...

Could somone point me to a link to either get these acrynoms ... or the strats involved... explained. The search engine is disabled right now!

OCN ...?

RCP ... ESPECIALLY this one!

HELP!!

Acronyms: http://www.civfanatics.com/civ3faq.shtml#acronyms

RCP: http://www.civfanatics.com/civ3acad_ring_city.shtml

Why, EVERYTIME an exploit of any sort happens, do Firaxis have to "correct" it by f*cking up the whole gameplay ?

Originally posted by zorven
Acronyms: http://www.civfanatics.com/civ3faq.shtml#acronyms

RCP: http://www.civfanatics.com/civ3acad_ring_city.shtml

@zorven
THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!!!

at the risk of harpingon this again, and re: "Please do not succumb to the temptation to just use the average rank for all cities at the same distance from a core. "


corruption should have almost NOTHING to do with "distance" from anything except in only the most crude of governments.

If anything, it should be more random...or use something like what was suggested "how long would it take a gov official to get to the city from the capital"

and oh, i've never found ANY major improvement by building ALL the city improvements that are SUPPOSED to fight corruption...never even made a dent in shield loss, imho...so maybe that needs to be addressed to

Originally posted by RedwoodTree
corruption should have almost NOTHING to do with "distance" from anything except in only the most crude of governments.

If anything, it should be more random...or use something like what was suggested "how long would it take a gov official to get to the city from the capital"
It's spread evenly in communism, but I consider communism to be more 'crude' a government than republic or democracry.

I also don't understand your point. In one sentence you say that corruption should have almost nothing to do with distance and yet in the next sentence you do.

I don't understand how they could come with such a messy formula with corruption. It's really making things uselessly confusing and more complex than they could be.

"Distance" should be calculated on the basis of movement points needed to go from the capitol/FP to the city. Primitive forms of government should multiply this number, while advanced form should divide it. Some tech advances could further diminish it.
A fixed number for communism, which does not depends on distance.

"Size" should simply be the total number of all cities, ajusted depending on the FP, the commercial trait and the government type.
Edit : and technologies, of course.

It would get rid of stupid formula bugs (like the RCP and FP), and avoid antilogical results (as increasing corruption when taking steps to diminish it).

RE: "In one sentence you say that corruption should have almost nothing to do with distance and yet in the next sentence you do."

There's a big difference between distance and travel time...

Originally posted by RedwoodTree
There's a big difference between distance and travel time...

Okay, that's where I didn't catch you. Indeed there is a significant difference. However, to base it on travel time would pose serious problems. For starters, the corruption 'engine' would no longer be formulaic, but have to take into account roaded tiles, etc, etc which change on a turn by turn basis. This increased processing would likely slow the game down...

In addition, since railroads give infinite movement, railroads would seriously decrease corruption. IMHO, railroads are powerful enough.

I do agree the ranking systems have been implemented very poorly.

Originally posted by superslug

Okay, that's where I didn't catch you. Indeed there is a significant difference. However, to base it on travel time would pose serious problems. For starters, the corruption 'engine' would no longer be formulaic, but have to take into account roaded tiles, etc, etc which change on a turn by turn basis. This increased processing would likely slow the game down...


But they have to compute this anyways (and already are if I'm not mistaken, every time a new city is hooked up or an important tile gets destroyed there is a momentary slowdown. I suspect that it is computing exactly this.)

The game already has need of this so that it can compute the best path a unit should take when you give it an extended order.

Having a good infrastructure where your corruption busters can quickly get from city to city should reduce corruption significantly. I have no problem if rail and air travel essentially removes the distance component of corruption. In real life I can get to any city in my country within a day by rail (or a couple by road).

I like Akka's idea. It's simple, easy to understand, fairly logical, and doesn't have lots of gamey loopholes to exploit.

Originally posted by warpstorm
But they have to compute this anyways (and already are if I'm not mistaken, every time a new city is hooked up or an important tile gets destroyed there is a momentary slowdown. I suspect that it is computing exactly this.)

The game already has need of this so that it can compute the best path a unit should take when you give it an extended order.

Point well taken.

Originally posted by warpstorm


But they have to compute this anyways (and already are if I'm not mistaken, every time a new city is hooked up or an important tile gets destroyed there is a momentary slowdown. I suspect that it is computing exactly this.)

The game already has need of this so that it can compute the best path a unit should take when you give it an extended order.

Having a good infrastructure where your corruption busters can quickly get from city to city should reduce corruption significantly. I have no problem if rail and air travel essentially removes the distance component of corruption. In real life I can get to any city in my country within a day by rail (or a couple by road).

I like Akka's idea. It's simple, easy to understand, fairly logical, and doesn't have lots of gamey loopholes to exploit.

I agree that it would be nice if they did things this way, but I don't think they do already keep track of the travelling time between every city and its capital. Also, if you had it treat the FP and SPH as second and third palaces, then the calculation time would have to be doubled and tripled. Let's make a few calculations:

If you were playing with eight civilizations each with a FP and 25 cities, you would have to make 2 x 25 x 8 = 400 path-finding calculations each time a road was built or destroyed, or a city was built or destoyed.

Also, do you take the position of foreign and enemy units into consideration? (Since they can block roads.) How about moving through enemy territory? And how do you handle crossing water?

One thing that I think might work as a decent mid ground would be this system: (I admit that it wouldn't be ideal, but I think it has a decent amount of realism combined with practicality.)

Whenever a new city is built, it runs the path-finding calculation and then stores the number. The ruler can then pay a certain amount, by clicking a button on the city screen, to do "Beaurocratic Restructuring" or "Policy Survey" or "Cleanup Corruption Campaign" which just re-runs the calculation and stores the new number. Of course, this calculation would have to be re-run each time the Palace or FP were built, but that is, at least, less frequent than road-building.

Two major down-sides I see to this are:
1. It's kind of an akward system that could lead to some pretty strange corruption distributions if the player wanted to mess around with things.

2. The AI probably wouldn't be able to handle it very well. My suggestion would be that if a city was having bad corruption, the AI would pay for the Restructuring and then wait a minimum number of turns (dependant on current money and average corruption and stuff) before it would be willing to pay it again.

Another thing that could be done, is that a cities effective travel-time would increase over time for the purposes of calculating corruption, so the ruler would want to run a restructuring campaign on each city maybe once or twice over the course of a game. Also, there could be an option to pay for a nation-wide campaign.

Anyhow, it's kind of a crazy idea and I could certainly understand if you guys didn't like it. And it may be to impractical anyways--I haven't thought about it very much.

A few comments on the path-finding algoritm and the Optimal City Number (OCN).

A (well programmed) path-finding algorithm counts the distance between one city and all other cities at the same time. The processing time is only dependant on the distance between the one city (capital) and the furthest city (For people who know something about the speed of processes: I think the number of calcultions needed is quadratic in this distance). It's a very fast algorithm.

This way of corruption calculation (by using the travel time distance between cities) is already used in Call to Power, a predecessor of CivIII. This proves again that the processing time isn't a big deal.

Real-time strategy games use path-finding algorithms all the time to calculate the shortest path for all the units and these games still function well. The number of times the algorithm is needed in CivIII is far less. Really, the processing time for this algorithm isn't a big deal.

But I don't think the programmers will change the corruption model. It would probably be too much work, and they like the way it's programmed with OCN and all.
I just hope they will consider this corruption model Akka suggested for CivIV.

I know that the OCN will make it more difficult for the human player to totally dominate. But when this OCN really becomes an issue, is a point in the game that the Human player has basically already won the game (in my opinion). And it also stops your AI opponents from becoming really dangerous foes. A really large AI opponent will have a lot of corruption problems and won't be as strong as its size may suggest.
For me, the OCN takes some of the excitement out of the game.

However they decide to fix the corruption, I hope they do it soon. I have played Civ since the very beggining and when I first started playing Civ III, I found the corruption level quite anoying. After the patches however, I found it much more reasonable. And at leaste they include a constant corruption government like communism for those like me who love big empires. I can't stand having cities with 99% corruption, so if I am not planning on using communism in a game I will usualy just raise a far off city. Anyhow, I am so upset that I rushed out to buy Conquests only to find that corruption is all messed up again. I can deal with bugs that cause the sound to twitch, or the fact that they didn't include overhead art for the new wonders, but the corruption just makes me angry. God I hope they fix this soon!! It is like having to wait for Conquests all over again.

Another idea: Decrease the corruption in a city A if the capital/FP city and the city A are connected with roads/harbors( this is already computed because of luxuries/resources ).
Further decrease it, if they are connected with railroads or airports.
Then, in modern times, it would be easier to control large empires.

The whole idea is that with higher corruption empires become easier to manage because they don't need to be large to be economically effective.

I like the current corruption model. They just need to make it work like they intended it to work.

Corruption is horrible in the current setting. I have second ring cities that are fully corrupt with 14 shields and about 20 commerce. It takes a hell of a long time (or a lot of money) to build a 60 shield temple and an 80 shield courthouse to make a fully corrupt town useful. This is ridiculous for second ring on the FP.

It is almost as if the OCN number is not being adjusted for the addition of the FP (or SPHC). That might account for some of the problem.

The PTW model of corruption was not that far off from being reasonable. It does take into account connectivity to the capital. More importantly, it reasonably blends in the location of the FP with the capitol. I had heard that they were going to reduce corruption levels overall in C3C. Overseas or distant lands would not be hopeless. That would be a welcome change. I like the idea of the new specialists. But the amount of MMing that they will require is not something that I am looking forward to. If that is their answer to horrible corruption, I don't like the solution.

Purportedly, the C3C corruption changes were made to get rid of RCP. Well, why not go back to the PTW corruption system. But for towns equidistant from the palace or FP, use the order in which they were founded as the tie-breaker. The game makes that calculation anyway. It is the order that is listed on the F1 screen.

The current corruption model is badly broken. It reduces the area that is useable by normal means. The purported options to help it (new specialists) are not available until many games are more than halfway over. It adds substantial tedium to the latter-stages of a game that already suffers from substantial late-game tedium. If someone from Firaxis/Atari/Breakaway is reading this, I say to you, "Please fix this very bad change to C3C. It is not a welcome addition to your product".

It is a bug. Firaxis knows about it already. Really.

I can confirm the FP is 100% broken. I created the below spreadsheet and it confirms that before and after the FP resulted in NO change in corruption.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads5/LAK-Corruption.xls

I always toy with the idea of Courthouses and Police Stations to produce some sort of "anti corruption points" (ACPs), like culture points. The longer a city has had such improvements the less corruption it has and it can influence neighboring cities to reduce their corruption.... different governments may have a bonus or penalty on their "ACPs"... that way one does not have to worry for distances... but instead one creates a culture of following the laws...

FP and Palace produce ACP right from the start, so the capital can influence neighboring cities right away, thus having less corruption...

Just a thought... and a corruption system that makes sense to me..

Originally posted by Ridgelake
Corruption is horrible in the current setting. I have second ring cities that are fully corrupt with 14 shields and about 20 commerce. It takes a hell of a long time (or a lot of money) to build a 60 shield temple and an 80 shield courthouse to make a fully corrupt town useful.

Right now, the most efficient solution is : use engineer specialists. They give you two uncorruptible shields each, that rocks.

Originally posted by warpstorm
It is a bug. Firaxis knows about it already. Really.

thank you, warpstorm!

still, it would really be nice if one fo them could make an official announcemnt: 'We know about this bug and will try our best to fix it'. As it is I hope they are too busy with the first patch to do so, but it still would be nice ;)

It is a bug. Firaxis knows about it already. Really.

Warpstorm would you care to explain a bit more how you can be so sure of that ? Got inside sources or somehting ?
I want to believe you, just give me some reason to do it please ! :D

I emailed them and they emailed back.

Originally posted by Mercade
Whichever formula or system is implemented, building a FP should never increase the corruption in any city.

Please please please release the patch soon... Just release a patch for this and I'll be happy. I absolutely hate corruption in my cities. :mad: Especially if it happens AFTER I build my Forbidden Palace! :mad:

OK what the hell is their problem???

For non-communal corruption...

Firstly, calculate each city's distance from the capital, and the Forbidden palace. Take the lower of these two figures as the corruption distance.

Secondly, sort the cities by the distances obtained above. If two cities have the same distance, use secondary sort criteria such as the order in which the cities were founded.

Thirdly, assign corruption based on the sorted city list.

So damn simple, there is no excuse for this.

Arizona: Your suggested way of doing it can actual still cause an increase of corruption in some cites as some cities will undoubtedly be pushed further down the corruption list than they were once a FP or whatever is build.

I still say corruption based on distance from palace/FP only should be enough, with the added increase after OCN is reached of course (and with the 'same-distance-cities-counting-as-1-city-only-against-OCN' bug fixed also of course).

Whatever way the bug-fix is done, I want those corruption numbers to go down around my FP, not increase! :(

Since I always wait to build my FP in my games, I am glad I did wait and not build my FP! Researching Capitalization, and was going to put my FP in some foregin conquered cities, but scratch that until the patch comes out.

bah to late for me... my capital was producing an army evry 11 turns, after the FP it took 15 :P

I am very glad that the designers attempted to tackle the evil that was RCP :p but their "solution" is, of course, ridiculous. This has really dampened my enthusiasm for Conquests :( Let's hope they can get a patch out soon.

Why not reduce the max corruption and max waste from 95% to, let's say, 80%? :crazyeye:

being a new Civ3 purchaser and new member of this forum, i was very surprised at how successfully corruption takes the fun out of end games. does anyone know why firaxis designers wanted to punish the good people of our peripheral cities?:rolleyes:

A lot of what you are seeing is due a bug. Corruption can be high, but it can normally be fought. Normally the FP gives you a second core of very productive cities.

I hear policemen actually make corruption *worse* in at least some cases.

Is this confirmed?

-mS

Something very much like Arizona's suggestion should work--it's just that you need *two* corruption lists. One list is associated with the palace, one with the FP. Each city is on only one list--the list associated with whichever of the two (FP or Palace) is nearer.

This should cause it to be the case that cities closer to the palace will not change in corruption value, while cities closer to the FP will, and the corruption values will meet in the middle as you get to cities nearly the same distance from each.

-mS

Originally posted by Master Shake
I hear policemen actually make corruption *worse* in at least some cases.

Is this confirmed?


I have never seen such a case.

But policemen do not have any effect if your city is benefiting from the 95% corruption cap.

By the way, I have never found courthouses or police stations to have a significant effect once my civ is very large.

I can have cities in a democracy with both a police station and a courthouse, and still be just producing one, maybe two shields out of a large total...

Anyone else share this experience? Or am I doing something wrong?

-mS

Originally posted by Master Shake
By the way, I have never found courthouses or police stations to have a significant effect once my civ is very large.

I can have cities in a democracy with both a police station and a courthouse, and still be just producing one, maybe two shields out of a large total...

Anyone else share this experience? Or am I doing something wrong?

-mS

If the city is far, very far, from the FP or Palace, no amount or corruption reducing improvements will help it.

Has anyone else seen this? Adding shields reduces productive shield output!! :eek: :confused:

This is really wrong. :sad:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads5/ror_corruption_wrong_1.jpg

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads5/ror_corruption_wrong_2.jpg

Yes, Sir Pleb found the same thing. (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=69277)

It seems to be associated with the corruption slider being set at anything but 100% (as it is in several of the Conquests, but fortunately not in the epic game)

[Edit: added link]

Originally posted by Akka
Why, EVERYTIME an exploit of any sort happens, do Firaxis have to "correct" it by f*cking up the whole gameplay ?

Absolutely...I have seen this in the beta too.

Give them a problem to fix, they'll fix the problem, but spawn another problem as they don't seem to consider the consequences of the changes made or test for them before passing the work onto either the testers or the public (this problem was "fixed" after the beta-test).

In this case it seems they went for a really rotten way of fixing the RP problem that is completely nonsensical and so will be hated by many.

If people would stop building 50+ cities, maybe they'd have less problems with corruption. In my most recent game, the FP worked just fine for me, but then I only had 13 cities most of the game.

Originally posted by playshogi
If people would stop building 50+ cities, maybe they'd have less problems with corruption. In my most recent game, the FP worked just fine for me, but then I only had 13 cities most of the game.

The present FP is broken. It is not an issue of 50 versus 13 cities. The very function of the FP - to act as a second palace for corruption purposes - has been emasculated. It now acts as a second palace for distance corruption purposes, but has a negative effect on city rank corruption. The player has a choice, under this version, of retaining his/her developed core and suffering mildly higher distance corruption, or establishing an FP and enjoying reduced corruption from distance around the FP but increased corruption in the palace core due to increased ranks of "palace cities." Combined with the RCP "fix" (how exactly does rank work in the buggy FP environment?) corruption is greatly increased.

Under present circumstances, unless the FP is available in an ideal or near ideal location, at the very, very early game, it strikes me as very rarely making sense to build the FP in this initial C3C release. That result is not the intent of the developers, nor is it a natural consequence of trying to grow one's empire.

I too am experimenting / playing with smaller empires; but the design was not intended to demand smallish empires. It is a bug.

Originally posted by playshogi
If people would stop building 50+ cities, maybe they'd have less problems with corruption. In my most recent game, the FP worked just fine for me, but then I only had 13 cities most of the game.
Some people can beat any level just about any game any time, so the only reason they're still playing is for high scores. Since scores are based of population and territory...:rolleyes:

Aww, come on guys, give us a break.:( What are we supposed to do when other nations keep begging to give us their cities and wealth and techs. It would be positively rude to turn them down.;)

Seems to me tha the easy fix would be to calculate corruption based on the distance to the nearer of the FP or Palace. As (I believe) was the intent with the PTW corruption model.

If they want to stuff RCP, then fine, but do it by (say) the order that the cities were founded.

Originally posted by ainwood
Seems to me tha the easy fix would be to calculate corruption based on the distance to the nearer of the FP or Palace. As (I believe) was the intent with the PTW corruption model.

But this is done already in C3C for the distance part of the corruption, and it works as it should AFAIK.

The problem is the rank part of the corruption. IMHO, a sensible solution would be to first divide all cities in two groups: a palace group and a FP group. Each city goes into the group that belongs to the (forbidden) palace it is closest to - which matches the (forbidden) palace it should count distance corruption towards.

Then, for each city in both palace groups, rank corruption is computed for those cities only, totally ignoring the cities in the other group. This way, a FP really will work as a second palace for corruption purposes.

If they want to stuff RCP, then fine, but do it by (say) the order that the cities were founded.
Yes, each palace group needs a tie-breaker when two cities have the same distance, and build order is as good as anything else.

Is it possible to mod corruption levels?

Maybe the development of Internet should remove the distance factors included in corruption calculation, so that the distance to Palace or FP would no longer affect corruption. ;)

Originally posted by TheNiceOne

But this is done already in C3C for the distance part of the corruption, and it works as it should AFAIK.

The problem is the rank part of the corruption. IMHO, a sensible solution would be to first divide all cities in two groups: a palace group and a FP group. Each city goes into the group that belongs to the (forbidden) palace it is closest to - which matches the (forbidden) palace it should count distance corruption towards.

Then, for each city in both palace groups, rank corruption is computed for those cities only, totally ignoring the cities in the other group. This way, a FP really will work as a second palace for corruption purposes.


Yes, each palace group needs a tie-breaker when two cities have the same distance, and build order is as good as anything else.

I think we're both saying the same thing. :)

Originally posted by V for Victory
Is it possible to mod corruption levels?

Yes, just go into the editor. Under Difficulty Levels, change the corruption slider to less than 100%. Voi la: less corruption. Works very nicely. :goodjob:

--CK

Back to basics: Corruption was managable in previous releases but the RCP fix does not use the right mats. So I would be completely happy with a fix that provides both pre-Conquests corruption levels AND fixes RCP. Imo this just comes down to solving the equidistant city issue with an FP and not much else.

Issues I see with solutions around a city age based solution:
- Civ already has a mechanism keeping track of city age, i.e. if an AI capital is captured it will resolve production close to your own captial in upkeep. So a former captial city far away could have less corruption compared to a new city close to your own capital?
- How to deal with equidistant cities build at the same time?

Also it completely makes sense for cities about halfway Palace and FP to get some benefit from both.

So, instead of working with a ranked list each turn why not simply calculate the distance to Palace / FP once a city is build or changes hands and keep this number with city stats? And just recalc once there is a Palace Jump or a FP is build.

Might be missing s'thing.

Well don't forget - the FP rank bug that exists in PTW. That was also fixed, and I want it to stay that way.

We either need 2 lists, or the FP increases OCN.

Originally posted by Colonel Kraken
Yes, just go into the editor. Under Difficulty Levels, change the corruption slider to less than 100%. Voi la: less corruption. Works very nicely. :goodjob:

--CK The corruption slider is buggy - it gives incorrect amounts of corruption in cities when not set to 100%.

I guess I don't understand corruption. But why not compute corruption based on distance from Palace, distance from FP, and distance from SPHQ and the city receives its best score. At that point, you can modify it for the other corruption variables, like OCN, government and civ traits.

After reading this thread, if I understand correctly the corruption calculations were modified in C3C ONLY to prevent the RCP exploit.
That sucks.
Corruption worked really fine for people who played without exploiting. And just because some fanatics ;) found an exploit and overused it, they tried to correct it and went all wrong ? Blah, I say blah (I'm quite angry, yes).
How many people used RCP ? Heck, I can figure it's about placing your cities in circles (Einstein here I come), but if you played without RCP, corruption was NOT that annoying.
The thing I still want to know is this : is the new corruption in C3C good in its principle, but calculations are flawed (in that case, we can expect a patch quickly), or it is the principle in itself that is flawed (in that case, well... :( )?

Double post, sorry :)

Originally posted by anarres
The corruption slider is buggy - it gives incorrect amounts of corruption in cities when not set to 100%.

anarres, would you please explain to us what you mean by this?

I mentioned it in post 77 of this thread, here is the bug report by Sir Pleb.

Note I should have said waste and not corruption.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=69277

much obliged.
:thumbsup:

Originally posted by Beammeuppy
Issues I see with solutions around a city age based solution:
- Civ already has a mechanism keeping track of city age, i.e. if an AI capital is captured it will resolve production close to your own captial in upkeep. So a former captial city far away could have less corruption compared to a new city close to your own capital?
- How to deal with equidistant cities build at the same time?



The city age isn't supposed to be the first thing to consider when computing the rank of the city.
It is only considered when you have two cities at the same distance. Then the oldest one get the best corruption (only rank corruption).
Civ 3 keeps track of the order, if you open the F1-Screen, you see the order of your cities, so the one which is founded first is first, even if it is in the same round.

What I want to see is a public acknowlegment of the bug by Atari/Breakaway/Firaxis and a statement saying that they are working on a fix.
The longer they go without saying anything, just leads me to believe that they have adopted a ostrich like mentality with regards to this problem. (Stick your head in the sand and hope it goes away)

seems a pitty that the guys from Atari/Firaxis don't post once in a while in this forum, just to let us know we aren't posting these bug reports for nothing... And Matt_G is more than right, they should tell us they got the message and that are working on it, everything else is, in my opinion, like saying they don't care too much about the players (which I know is not right, proven by a multitude of patches, but still...)

I honestly don't find corruption to be too bad except for those pesky totally corrupt cities far away. Only in the non-patched vannila civ was it bad along time ago. In any case I have a formula:
1. take each cities distance from the palace, FP, and other FPs.
2. Compute the rank for each distance.
3. Take the smallest rank and get the corruption percentage from that.
That way adding an FP won't increase corruption for cities closer to the palace than the FP but still farther from the palace than at least 1 city is from the FP.

Originally posted by slothman
I honestly don't find corruption to be too bad except for those pesky totally corrupt cities far away.

You should try to load a vanilla/PTW save into C3C...

I did that.
Stats:
vanilla game on small(!) map, civ=Germany, emp level, modern times (banks all over the place & everything fully improved), 'wrong' RCP style; game started before Qitai posted the rank bug discovery and I had two RCP cores, the FP core was much bigger than the palace core (in terms of cities per ring and # of rings in total), so I did not even benefit that much from RCP/rank bug.

Apparently, the tax income/corruption etc is shown as ususal (vanilla calculation) right after reloading into C3C on F1 (and on city screens). My research aim had 4 turns to go and I made ~80 gpt (incl. ~+200gpt trade balance) at 10% lux tax.
Pressed 'end turn' and the C3C calculation kicked in...
:cry::wallbash::(:mad:
At 100% (!!!) tax, I made ~-150gpt (including my trade income!!), research dropped to 35 turns (so I had obviously not produced that many beakers on the current advance)

So I was quite annoyed. I don't want to be extra-punished for having cities at same Palace/FP distance (which affects the ai as well!)! Atm, I try to make a "spiral" founding style if possible and/or waste numerous working tiles (comparably cities now very widely spaced). I don't build FP at all.

Originally posted by Grille
So I was quite annoyed. I don't want to be extra-punished for having cities at same Palace/FP distance (which affects the ai as well!)! Atm, I try to make a "spiral" founding style if possible and/or waste numerous working tiles (comparably cities now very widely spaced). I don't build FP at all.

I found my FP to be usefull - because my empire was small and the cities had to be a different distances because of geography (I would have screamed bloddy murder if I had been forced to go RCP on that map).

It depends a lot on the map and luck :(

Originally posted by Grille


You should try to load a vanilla/PTW save into C3C...

I did that.
Stats:
vanilla game on small(!) map, civ=Germany, emp level, modern times (banks all over the place & everything fully improved), 'wrong' RCP style; game started before Qitai posted the rank bug discovery and I had two RCP cores, the FP core was much bigger than the palace core (in terms of cities per ring and # of rings in total), so I did not even benefit that much from RCP/rank bug.

Apparently, the tax income/corruption etc is shown as ususal (vanilla calculation) right after reloading into C3C on F1 (and on city screens). My research aim had 4 turns to go and I made ~80 gpt (incl. ~+200gpt trade balance) at 10% lux tax.
Pressed 'end turn' and the C3C calculation kicked in...
:cry::wallbash::(:mad:
At 100% (!!!) tax, I made ~-150gpt (including my trade income!!), research dropped to 35 turns (so I had obviously not produced that many beakers on the current advance)

So I was quite annoyed. I don't want to be extra-punished for having cities at same Palace/FP distance (which affects the ai as well!)! Atm, I try to make a "spiral" founding style if possible and/or waste numerous working tiles (comparably cities now very widely spaced). I don't build FP at all.

i loaded my last ptw game into conquests, +665 gpt on load, then it fell to +300 gpt after moving the lux slider back and forth, when i abandoned my city with the FP it then fell to +100, so my FP had some benefit, probably as someone said, luck of the draw

i think doing this however, you have to take into consideration the government and the different costs involved in C3C of keeping them, if you have a mega-army in republic then it will drop somewhat

Originally posted by zurichuk


i loaded my last ptw game into conquests, +665 gpt on load, then it fell to +300 gpt after moving the lux slider back and forth, when i abandoned my city with the FP it then fell to +100, so my FP had some benefit, probably as someone said, luck of the draw

i think doing this however, you have to take into consideration the government and the different costs involved in C3C of keeping them, if you have a mega-army in republic then it will drop somewhat

Well, sounds like as most of your cities had different Palace/FP distances each.

About rebublic: Yes, I had that gov. But IIRC upkeep was still 1gpt (and per unit) after loading into C3C (guess old 'rules' were used here). Also, I had a lot of metros (and cities in general) and just an avarage sized military: on a rough estimation, I would not have paid anything for upkeep if the C3C republic rules apllied.

ok fair enough :)

Does anybody know whether the latest C3C patch (version 1.02) has solved this corruption issue? :) I really look forward to building FP in a 'normal' way.

No, the corruption issue was not dealt with in the 1.02 patch. That patch only deals with text and art issues, and not any gameplay changes/fixes.

Thank God. Those art bugs were really hampering my gameplay...

LOL pjmcb!

Totally agree, these corruption bugs are game ruining.

As for the RCP fix! I like to place some cities at equal distance from the capital in order to have a unified territory and to maximise the amount of workable squares; not to take advantage of the RCP bug. The fix will penalise me for wanting a unified territory now. Corruption ranking in order of placing, when part of a ring seems like a good idea, I think it would still work when you put a FP down to. Would it?

I don't know if I am happy I read this thread. A sane person wouldn't even consider buying conquests after reading through it.
I guess I'll have the pleasure of handing over my dosh and feeling like a complete idiot while I am doing it - not exactly the consumerist high I was hoping for.
I remember Anarres asked a Firaxis rep. some months ago whether RCP was fixed? The guy ( who I'll henceforth refer to as COMICAL ALI) replied "Yeah its fixed". Anarres then asks the obvious question "How did you fix it?" COMICAL ALI replies "It's fixed"
What Kitten of Chaos has said about the programmers would be fair enough if there was any sign of an evolutionary pathway from PTW RCP to the Conquests reverse RCP cludge. But this seems to all intents and purposes like they implemented the first and dumbest solution they thought up and it was never checked. Or if it was checked the programmers either didn't want to or couldn't understand what the play testers were pointing out.
Which is it ? I would like to know because we could be months away from a working corruption model and I would like to know who I should be hurling abuse at while passing the time.:mad:

I like what Aeldrik said.It's not a bad idea if someone from Atari/Firaxis post just to informs us if they are trying to find how to solve this problem or not(maybe they do not consider corruption a bug problem).Anyway in my recent epic game(don't know how to post the image)none of my cities is sowing that it has a minimum of corruption in treasure/box-city screen-(this is not possible).However in the general screen F1 i see that i loose money from corruption(a grate deal of money),so i can't rase science more than 30%-My situation:Republik-500AD-Seling ivory,furs and i barely manage not to bankrupt.I have build F.P and guess what,corruption has increased.It is realy anoying,because i can't enjoy the game.