Corruption issues

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"
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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...
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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...
Click to expand...

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.
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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.
Click to expand...

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 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.
Click to expand...

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.
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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.
Click to expand...

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
 
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