Originally posted by Yumbo
I have read conflicting things about the effectiveness of using the editor to combat corruption. Some posters have said it doesn't work, or that it throws the game balance way out of whack.
I'm not necessarily agreeing that we need a toggle for corruption levels, but I do agree that most players aren't going to step in and use the editor.
Playing around with corruption related stuff in the editor is surely effective.
As far as I understand it, the corruption slider will only affect distance corruption. The slider has to be set for each difficulty level
seperately(!); maybe those who say this measure is not effective missed that point. If you e.g. only modify corruption slider for chieftain level (IIRC this is the default selection when you access the difficulty level tab in the editor, so you can easily mess up this thing) and then play any other level than chieftain with your bic/bix/biq, you'd still use the default corruption settings in the game.
Distance corruption is the same for human and AI *AFAIK*.
I'm not sure about the balance effect here, since I don't know if the ai is automatically programmed to build useless stuff like wealth in distant cities (because AI may not look at city's productivity) - instead of ordering build projects like in a 'real' core city. The human player, however, would of course fully improve such cities. Maybe someone tested this issue.
It's my impression that Civ3 becomes "easier" if the corruption slider is lowered - but in all regards, a human can probably handle a productive city much better than the AI anyways (and with lowered corruption, there'd be more core-like cities).
Corruption behaviour is more like in Civ1,2/SMAC then (depends particulary on the slider setting, of course, and OCN setting on top of that), and I think that point would be in the interest of the 'corruption is too high in Civ3' faction.
There was (is still in 1.12?) some bug when using the slider, probably due to rounding on an 'interstage' when calculating the corruption/waste.
I think Tavis stated this bug was removed in 1.12 - not sure if someone confirmed with a test [I'd rather have a test w/ shiny pics and save file(s) than just believing a statement...
]. But it's a minor issue compared to the corruption changes that apply as a whole.
If you mod the OCN (like anarres said, by default, OCN corruption is already dependent on difficulty level), the ai adjusts its strategy behaviour. Lower AI-OCN and the AI would stop the settling phase earlier (and eventually raze captured cities instead of keeping them) and vice versa. Higher OCN would be in favour of the 'large empire' faction, I guess.
So even if all this was imbalancing, it would probably still be a matter of taste. The editor offers a lot of choices to adjust stuff to your pleasure.
You could probably even 'counter-balance' by giving the ai some other advantage you don't have.
I can understand that a player, whether 'casual' or else, won't visit the editor right after installing Civ3. However, I recommend just checking the editor, and if it was only for a look at the default rules. You can learn a lot about difficulty differences, resource depletion etc... Some heating "the ai cheats" or "civ3 messed up corruption" [in general...
] discussion *could* have been spared by taking a glance at the editor.
Then again, my spam here still has the bottom-line: You don't get hot about stuff you simply don't know. When starting Civ, you'd look into the manual (and not so likely, but possibly, into some readme files) to get some info. And the manual is unfortunately monkey business...
Manual's value would go through the roof if there was these 3 lines:
-don't take me literal
-read a fan site and/or register(ask) there
-check the editor
But: I am not aware of a game that had that much fan-developer interaction to get rid of bugs or to improve the game.
