Diverting City Production

[yoshi]

A way of reducing the unbalancing effect would be to limit the # of shields automatically given to a city per # of cities would be to decrease the # as the empire gets bigger.

Disbanding units is very inefficient. My system is eessentially 'you get what you pay for' without the extensive micromanagement. Note that the AI doesn't know how to disband units for production purposes either so my idea does not make the game easier, it makes city-specific transfers of production less tedious.
A way of discouraging players from turning this into an exploit is to make it very expensive.

So there is no penalty whatsoever to adding cities to the fringes/outer rim of your empire (in fact, you do become stronger).

Didn't get this part. It sounds like you're saying that building cities further away has no further corruption penalty.

 

[Bamspeedy]

Didn't get this part. It sounds like you're saying that building cities further away has no further corruption penalty.

It doesn't add any more corruption to the cities that are closer to the palace.
Example:
City A (closest to capital) has 10% corruption
City B (further away) has 15% corruption.

If you build city C farther away from the Palace than either city A or B, then City A will still have 10% and City B will still have 15% corruption.

If you build City C between where City A and City B are, then only City B will increase in corruption.

If you build City C right next to your palace, or closer to the palace than City A, then both City A and City B will have an increase in corruption.

Edit: For communism, then no matter where you build City C, ALL cities will increase in corruption (including the capital!).

So let's say I have 10 cities producing 100 shields total.
You have an identical 10 cities also producing 100 shields total.
If you have 10 extra cities, then those 10 cities, yes will be higher corrupt (but still producing something), but your first 10 cities are producing just as many as my 10.

The only time 'bigger' civs actually get weaker is when they try to put every improvement in those super-corrupt cities. Or they exceed the 'free unit support' of those cities by piling them up with defenders they don't need in them.

 

[yoshi]

I understand your statement about corruption, but now I don't understand why bigger civs don't suffer as a result of corruption. If a small civ has (to keep with your example) 10 cities and the big civ has 20 cities, thus the bigger civ will have more corruption in the last 10 cities thus the big civ is limited to using only it first 10 cities. If this is the case, the small and big civ are similar although one is bigger than the other. Granted, this is an artificial example and Civ3's corruption is not so clean cut but essentially it says that corruption WILL equalize big and small civs to a degree.

Either way, the limitation I mentioned in my previous post should further 'equalize' things.

 

[warpstorm]

Originally posted by yoshi
The only problem with this is of course that it gives the human an advantage over the AI as programmers would probably have trouble getting the AI to use this feature. Then again, the Civ2 AI had this problem and nobody complained.

Sure they did. I know I did. Many of the changes from Civ2 to Civ3 were prompted by players' complaints about the old systems.

 

[TheNiceOne]

Originally posted by yoshi
I understand your statement about corruption, but now I don't understand why bigger civs don't suffer as a result of corruption. If a small civ has (to keep with your example) 10 cities and the big civ has 20 cities, thus the bigger civ will have more corruption in the last 10 cities thus the big civ is limited to using only it first 10 cities. If this is the case, the small and big civ are similar although one is bigger than the other. Granted, this is an artificial example and Civ3's corruption is not so clean cut but essentially it says that corruption WILL equalize big and small civs to a degree.

The big city is never limited to using only its 10 fisrt cities. The 10 first (closest to the palace) are better than the 10 additional, but the 10 additional will always add some shields/gold as well as unit support to your empire. The civ with 20 cities will not be twice as good as the 10 city civ, but it will be 50% better or so.

Yes, the corruption will equalize it to a degree, since the big city is only 50% better, but that's very good IMHO.