A Rank Corruption Discovery and Exploit to negate rank corruption

That's exactly why there's this grey area about this bug. You may already have unintentionally gained an advantage in some game, most likely when there was a more or less dense built in the initial core and your palace moved to a distant stand-alone city. Then, there'd be a noticed income boost which would not make any sense in the context the rank/distance system was formerly assumed to work.

 

Dianthus/Qitai,
Thanks for the explanation! Thanks to you, I now know what the fuss is all about. Pretty bad. I won't even bother trying to comprehend why.

 

Here are the results of my test.

The test was conducted on a huge map with an isolated small continent where I could build ring cities out about distance 11 from the palace. The palace city has all the resources needed to play the game to the end. All other tiles on the continent are bonus grassland with cows bordered with rivers. Every city works exactly the same type of tiles with the same population so should always get the same productivity if it is the same distance from the palace. This is what always happens so all I had to do was take one of these test cases for a palace/FP switch.

The test case was a map that had two rings. One ring had 6 cities at distance 5 and another ring of 12 cities at distance 9. The test map also has two other large continents on it and on one of these I placed a new city labeled New Palace. New palace is over 50 tiles from the closest city in the outer ring. There are also 4 coast cities but even though they are up to 14.5 distance from the palace I decided not to use them in the test because many of their tiles are not bonus grassland with cows.

The first test condition will be with the ring cities having the following improvements: marketplace, courthouse, bank, and factory. I only list those improvements that will affect the production of shields and gold. The population of the first test condition will be 12 and I will present data from both the palace center and the FP center as raw data and modified data. The raw data will only include the effects of the courthouse with the entertainment slider set to 100%. The modified data will include all the effects of all the listed improvements with the tax set to 100%.

The 6 ring 5 cities show exactly the same results regardless of whether the palace or the FP is in the ring center. It is in the 9 ring cities where you see the difference.

In the raw data the shield production for a palace centered 9 ring city is 51 with a loss of 5 for an efficiency of 90.2%. When you replace the palace with the FP the shield production is still 51 but the loss is only 2 for an efficiency of 96.1%. That is an improvement of almost 6%. When you include the effects of the city improvements the palace centered city produces 74 shields with the same loss of 5 for an efficiency of 93.2%. The FP centered city produces 75 shields with the same loss of 2 for an efficiency of 97.3%. Now the improvement is only about 4%.

Also in the raw data the commerce generation for a palace centered 9 ring city is 42 gold with a loss of 6 for an efficiency of 85.7%. When you replace the palace with the FP the commerce generated is 42 gold with a loss of 3 for an efficiency of 92.9%. That is an improvement of over 7%. When you include the effects of the city improvements and the 100% tax rate the palace centered city generates 78 gold with a loss of 6 for an efficiency of 92.3%. The FP centered city generates 81 gold with a loss fo 3 for an efficiency of 96.3%. Now the improvement is only 4%.

The other test condition will be with the ring cities having a population of 20 and the following improvements: marketplace, courthouse, bank, factory, hydro plant, police station, and stock exchange.

In the raw data the shield production for a palace centered 9 ring city is 81 with a loss of 6 for an efficiency of 90.8%. When you replace the palace with the FP the shield production is still 81 but the loss is only 2 for an efficiency of 97.5%. That is an improvement of almost 7%. When you include the effects of the city improvements the palace centered city produces 156 shields with the same loss of 6 for an efficiency of 96.2%. The FP centered city produces 160 shields with the same loss of 2 for an efficiency of 98.8%. Now the improvement is less than 3%.

Also in the raw data the commerce generation for a palace centered 9 ring city is 65 gold with a loss of 6 for an efficiency of 90.8%. When you replace the palace with the FP the commerce generated is 65 gold with a loss of 3 for an efficiency of 95.4%. That is an improvement of less than 5%. When you include the effects of the city improvements and the 100% tax rate the palace centered city generates 153 gold with a loss of 6 for an efficiency of 96.1%. The FP centered city generates 158 gold with a loss fo 3 for an efficiency of 98.1%. Now the improvement is only 2%

One odd thing that surfaced in these tests was the fact that distance affects the calculation for commerce but had no effect of shield production when the FP is the centered city and there are no cities closer to the palace. In other words the shield production and losses were the same for all cities centered on the FP no matter if they were in the 5 ring or the 9 ring.

My conclusions are the effects are more significient if you play the game with little on no improvements to your cities. If you are a builder who builds most of the improvements in your core cities the effects are minimal no matter how you arrange your cities.

 

Svar. For the effect of the improvements on corruption, please refer to Alex's thread on corruption. His formulas clearly explain the effect of the improvement on corruption.

As for your observation, when you use the exploit, rank corruption is minimized or constant. Distance corruption can be drastically reduce with government types, improvements and WLTKD. The effects of all these in combination can make distance corruption almost neligible when the distance is short (i.e. in your test case, distance 5 and 9). So, esstentially, what you see is that the 2 corruption is probably due to rank corruption only. I cannot verify your figures since you did not specify the government type and difficulty level.

 

This is from the Conquests beta test channel. So they will at least be fixing it in the expansion.

<Ed-Firaxis> good news... Ring build, palace corruption exploit, and mobilization exploit fixed
<Ed-Firaxis> Yes
<Ed-Firaxis> I Suxor
<Friedrich> PM me a link to an explanation of it?
<Chieftess> There's a couple of threads on CFC, but the search has been disabled.
<Ed-Firaxis> Basicly if you have a forbidden palace, with a city closer to it then the capital it determines its rank by.....
<Ed-Firaxis> wait.....
<Ed-Firaxis> this is hard to explain
<Friedrich> LOL
<Friedrich> No need, Ed, just say "it is fixed"
<Chieftess> But, I have wondered why corruption seemed to do strange things at times
<Ed-Firaxis> it is fixed
<Ed-Firaxis> The dude that found this has way to much free time

 

I knew I left something out. From an earlier post "I play all test city placements as Carthaginians at Monarch difficulty level and conquest as the only victory condition so I really don't have to pay any attention to the other 7 civilizations."

Also the government type was always Republic and the cities were always in WLTKD. I hope this clarifies the test better. You are welcome to the 4 save games that were used to generate this data.

 

That's pretty amazing that they've fixed RCP! I wonder how they will cope with lots of cities all at the same distance - I can't see how they could fix it without changing from integer calculations.

I *hope* the mobilisation exploit refered to is the new one and not just the old one (i.e. a fix to mob as it is in 1.27, not just the 1.27 fix).

 

LOL. I just spend 1 hour to find this out, although this troubled me for a long time. Though, I have to say I was damn lucky to just have tested it out in a way which makes it quite obvious to suspect the result.

I did spend quite a bit of time creating my own corruption calculator with Alex's formula though.

Anyway, glad to hear they are going to fix this.

 

I don't think he means that RCP is fixed. I don't see that possible without introducing (a lot)more variables to make pure distance be less important.

I think only the far-away palace build exploit is fixed, maybe by introducing two distance rank counters, one for palace and one for FP, as was initially supposed by alexman (?) to be the case.

 

Having it get fixed in the expansion will be great...but I wonder what the result will be for the GOTM? The GOTM is all about letting people play whatever version they want...clearly, people using the expansion (when it comes out) will be at a disadvantage to those who decide to use it (even in the slightest manner) in PTW and vanilla.

 

So you're saying that cities with the same distance should get an average rank instead of all getting the highest rank?? I guess that should straighten things out better, yes

 

Cities that are the same distance should be ranked by the date they were founded.

 

Bizarre.

I accidentally found this "exploit", although not in such detail. And I haven't even played a game to its conclusion yet. I was moving my palace all over the place, and it seemed to pay dividends. Its such an obvious thing to do. Build up your improvements, increase culture value, then move on.

Now I wonder if I shall ever bother playing again. It seems to make things too easy.

Only joking. I might just buy the latest version instead. Gonna cost me though.

This ring city thing, does anyone actually use it? It seems too much hassle to even bother. Plus what happens if you are set on the coast to start with, does it work then too? Or there are mountains where you want to set your cities?

 

Then it wouldn't take people here long to find out that founding cities in the same year using RCP would give the old advantage of RCP. Maybe the order in which cities were founded if this is also registered by the game somehow.

I'm happy that I modded corruption a long time ago so that I don't have these problems.