Speaking of governments, one thing I still don't know is the difference between the different corruption/waste levels. Obviously Minimal is good and Catastrophic is real bad. But is Problematic better or worse than Nuisance? I'm guessing better because I've never gotten arrested for being a Public Problematic. And what about Rampant? (I have never been arrested for being Publicly Rampant and hopefully no one else on this forum has either). If you have Rampant rats in your house, wouldn't they be both Problematic and a Nuisance, not to mention Communal (unless you live alone)?
The technical details (for Conquests) are at
this page. I don't pretend to have fully analyzed the formula, but the order is, from worst to best:
Catastrophic < Rampant < Problematic < Nuisance < Minimal
Although the difference between Problematic and Nuisance is often described as being Minimal.
(Communal being different altogether, and thus ranking differently depending on the situation)
The way I look at the terminology is, how much would something bother me? Let's take a lightbulb as an example. Currently, one of the Christmas lights in my apartment will occasionally turn off and turn back on; the rest of the strand is okay. This problem is of Minimal importance. It's not perfect but I'm not going to bother doing anything about it because 96% of the string is working just fine and that bulb works half the time.
If the whole strand were turning off occasionally after several hours, and I had to replace a fuse to get them to turn back on, it would be Nuisance status. This happened in the past when I daisy-chained too many incandescent strands. Eventually I fixed the root problem and ran another extension cord so I could daisy-chain fewer strands, but for a while I just played the whack-a-mole game of replacing fuses on occasion.
I have had cases where a bulb would occasionally get
extremely bright, far more so than it should, and then go dark, and repeat the cycle at a short interval. This is Problematic; not only is the way-too-bright light highly distracting, I'm concerned it could be a fire hazard, and thinking it probably
should be blowing a fuse even though it isn't. Strands that start doing this get decommissioned and replaced.
Rampant would be like a flourescent light that's flickering rapidly. I saw one of those at a JC Penney last month, and I was tempted to file a maintenance report right away even though I didn't work there and had no obligation to do so. It would have driven me crazy if I'd lingered under it long enough.
Catastrophic would be the power has gone out and nothing's working.
So that's my lightbulb index of Civ3 corruption terminology. I agree though, Problematic versus Nuisance in particular is not obvious as to which one is worse.
(This also makes me wonder, is it any clearer in the translated versions of Civ3? Does the German version have clearer terminology?)