FIRAXIS: v1.13 and Patch Information

One thing weird I've noticed with 1.13 so far is ABSOLUTELY no corruption or waste in the capital cities.

Usually you get at least 1 corrupted shield and 1 or more gold lost in the capital once the totals mount up. My capital is at 27 shields and maybe 40-ish base gold atm with ZERO loss.

Dunno if this is intended or not, but I for one didn't mind the limited capital corruption; it made it satisfying to balance the food for a couple of policemen late game and watch the red icons disappear.

Either way is good but; just thought I'd mention it in case it wasn't intended.
 
Originally posted by Tacit_Exit
One thing weird I've noticed with 1.13 so far is ABSOLUTELY no corruption or waste in the capital cities.

Usually you get at least 1 corrupted shield and 1 or more gold lost in the capital once the totals mount up. My capital is at 27 shields and maybe 40-ish base gold atm with ZERO loss.
[...]

As far as *I* understand it from the Civilopedia, this is exactly as described. So, if this would not be intended, please don't put too much attention on this (in my eyes, very minor) issue, but make sure that the overall corruption issues are solved conveniently.

Additionally, I too want to express my thanks for you (Firaxis, Atari, Breakaway, my parents, my teachers,... whomever) trying to make the game better and solving the new/old bugs/problems.
 
Originally posted by Pounder


I am wondering if we will have to un-install the beta patches when the official patch comes out.

Could be... might not be a bad idea to uninstall and reinstall clean when applying the patch. But I'm pretty confident that Firaxis/Atari will allow us to patch on top of the beta patches.
 
Originally posted by Tacit_Exit
One thing weird I've noticed with 1.13 so far is ABSOLUTELY no corruption or waste in the capital cities.

Usually you get at least 1 corrupted shield and 1 or more gold lost in the capital once the totals mount up. My capital is at 27 shields and maybe 40-ish base gold atm with ZERO loss.

Dunno if this is intended or not, but I for one didn't mind the limited capital corruption; it made it satisfying to balance the food for a couple of policemen late game and watch the red icons disappear.

Either way is good but; just thought I'd mention it in case it wasn't intended.

Taken from the patch readme: "* Capitals (Palace, FP, SPHQ) have very little corruption". I think you should test it on a megapolice with 100+ shield or gold before you draw any conclusion to the corrutpion % in capitol, FP or SPHQ.

I can advice lowend system civers to uninstall the game between final patches to maintain optimal gameperformance. It's a bit timeconsuming. But it ensures that you don't get additional bugs/performance drops. This is just a general advice from my experience with other games I've played.
 
[
Originally posted by Singularity
Taken from the patch readme: "* Capitals (Palace, FP, SPHQ) have very little corruption". I think you should test it on a megapolice with 100+ shield or gold before you draw any conclusion to the corrutpion % in capitol, FP or SPHQ.

Capital city has no corruption in 1.13, it is zero. Apparently, some corruption observed previously was a result of the fact that the Capital was indeed at distance 1 from itself. Which makes no sense. Now, it is at distance 0. With FP city, it is more complicated. At reasonable distance it usually has 10-30% corruption. However, how this number is calculated is a mystery to me.

Also, corruptoin is capped at 90%, not 95% as in previous versions. This means if totally corrupt remote city makes 20 shields, previously it had 1 shield production and now it has 2 shields.

Also, there are some other changes. Actually, the whole corruption system becomes more logical and balanced overall with very few exceptions.
 
For what it's worth, here's my game as the Zulus under Communism with P,FP and SPHQ in a dispersed situation for your perusal.(Note this was a v. 1.12 converted to 1.13 but the form of gov't was chosen well after upgrade).
SewerStarFish of the Zulu

I like the FP/SPHQ effects so far.
 
Originally posted by Tavis
This was a patch that was released to a few people to review and IS NOT an official patch release

Yea I noticed that when it deleted my conquests.exe file...
I NEED SOMEONE TO GIVE ME THAT FILE!
Im getting bored without playing c3c :D and i dont want to
reinstall the game because ive completed 3 of the conquests.
 
Make a copy of the Campaign file that is in the root Conquests folder and your record won't be deleted when uninstalling.


FYI, you should not uninstall v12/v13 before installing the patch next week. You can, but you don't have to. The 2 files that provide the most significant changes are:

Civ3Conquests.EXE - where the bug fixes were

Labels.txt - Contains 2 additional text items for SEEDs & Play Last World. If you install v1.13 and suddenly your main menu text is messed up, its because you don't have the required v1.12 labels.txt update.
 
Originally posted by Dogmeat
Yea I noticed that when it deleted my conquests.exe file...
I NEED SOMEONE TO GIVE ME THAT FILE!
Im getting bored without playing c3c :D and i dont want to
reinstall the game because ive completed 3 of the conquests.

Like Tavis said, back up the data files and uninstall/reinstall for best results. I doubt anyone here is going to give you that file.
 
Dogmeat, you can also use Windows Me/XP/2000 restore, if you're running that. Just unroll back far enough in time to recover the exe file. As someone else mentioned, there is a strong cultural aversion to mailing anyone part of the game files for obvious reasons. Hell just copy it off your CD--it's not in a packed format on there, is it?

So Tavis, the installer will work right with an installed patch? All the other patches would create a new entry in the Add/Remove programs instead of keeping it to a single patch entry. I prefer to have only a single entry for the game itself, and the patch. You can always uninstall the existing patch and reinstall an older if need be. "Unrolling" patch versions is too messy if you do it out of order.
 
Yes, im gettting a friend to send it for me since noone else will help me. And reinstall is not an option! I dont want to play those conquests again!

...oh and i have windows 98... shucks!
 
I've been following this forum for months, and, as a long time civ fan, I finally decided to speak up about the subject that is a constant source of annoyance for me: corruption.

My first major game in the vanilla civ3 was on a huge earth map on an easy difficulty. Halfway through the game, with my capital being around New York, I conquered all of North America. Low and behold despite my democratic government, my happy population, and rush-building both the police station and the courthouse, my west-coast cities were still all essentially 90%-95% corrupt. What is this!!!!???? It was such a turn off. With all the cool features and improvements, the game is really good otherwise (a definate improvement on my beloved civ2). The corruption system really sucks.

I've been waiting, update after update, patch after patch, expansion after expansion, for them to correct this and nothing has happened yet. In fact, it's worse now. The forbidden palace used to be one cool wonder... now it is only good for the city it's built in (excepting the higher OCN). I like to build a huge empire, a vast empire, a "great civilization", and yet any city a screen away the capital is useless; it can't build anything for itself! Now I can't even produce an effective second core of cities with an fp. Why should I capture enemy cities? I should just raze them all, as their inevitable and complete corruptness makes them essentially worthless (aside from being settler/worker factories, and havens for specialists). The games supposed to be about building... well how can we in this game?

I agree that corruption is a major part of the game... but not 95% (or 90% now). I certainly don't expect the no-corruption democracy of civ2. But players should be able to tackle corruption. With WLTK day, a democratic government, a commercial culture, one's most remote and distant city with a courthouse and police station should not have corruption more than 50% (if that even). And now with the policeman specialists we should be able to do away with even more corruption. All of this is an effort on the player's part, of course. The player is building the courthouse, or employing the policeman specialist, with the opportunity cost of build a marketplace/library or employing the citizen on one of the city's tiles. There is an opportunity cost there, just like there is with unhappiness (which was a similar nuisance in the 'luxury resourceless' civ2, but a nuisance that could be controlled with effort). If I didn't really believe this I wouldn't put the time in to write this essay (hell, I 'd rather enjoy a 'playable' c3c on my weekend!)

A game this complex cannot have a perfect AI. I would suspect, this is people's major beef with playing. AI's are uncreative in any game. Sure there are exploits, but what game doesn't have them?

I have some suggestions:

RCP: What's the big deal? I have trouble enough optimizing my city placement trying to put cities on rivers and lakes, and on coasts, while maximizing terrain usage and minimizing city overlap. That's enough of a challenge for me. Kudos to those who can also make cities equidistant from the capital to exploit this RCP technique.

Palace jump: Here's an easy solution. Have the palace jump to the city with the most culture, rather than the most population. That will certainly reduce the frequency of that exploit's use. The palace jump should be a credible strategy early in the game, when one realizes, after exploring a little, their capital isn't quite in the best spot... One can then just build their other cities accordingly eventually disband the initial city. Although the computer can't do this, for the player it still wastes some of it's valuable early years. I actually also think the idea that an existing forbidden palace becomes the next capital, making it the fp buildable again (of course, a critic would argue, one could prebuild the fp, which mostly maintains the existing palace jump grievance...sadly true)

SPHQ: I welcome a second, or rather third, palace like structure. But I think it should retain it abilities in all governments. The catch being that it can only be built in communist government. A small incentive for one to choose a Religious civ? Failing that, one has to decide: is all that anarchy (switching to and from communism for this small wonder) worth it?

Pre-builds: I like em. Sure they are unrealistic in some sense. But so is the fact that it takes a destoyer years to cross an ocean. Anyway if you reduce this exploit, I'll accept it, grudgingly.

Forest harvesting: Unlimited! Make it so that it is a flat 5 turns to plant and 5 turns to chop down, whether it's one slave or twenty workers doing the work. 10 shields over a period of 10 turns isn't a no-brainer decision. It could help a city, if used correctly, but it's tying up a worker. And lets face it a worker is valuable early in the game, and later in the game 10 shields is chicken feed for a big city.

Forests and Jungles as pollution sinks: How about having each forest/jungle tile reduce local and/or overall pollution by 1. That's one incentive to keep the world a little green.

Railroad Maintenance: As an effort to prevent railroads from becoming all encompassing. Have each tile railroaded cost a gold piece/turn. Well maybe that's a little steep.

Hidden nationality units: We need one. Say, a guerilla with attack/defence of 4/4 or 5/5. In civ2, I loved to see them emerge from captured cities... cool, partisans! They could also serve as modern barbarian units. Replace the existing 'guerilla' with a unit called an 'irregular', 'g.i.', or just 'soldier', or just with the rifleman.

Colonies: Colonies on coasts should be defacto ports (upon discovering seafaring). And be subject to the same tech requirements for trade linkage. I think that's quite logical, and would expand their usage. Workers should be able to build forts and barricades on top of them as well (is that possible now?).

I'm no computer programmer, but I'm sure most my suggestions are workable in a patch. I'm guessing the real trick is improving the AI and making it adaptable to all the changes proposed. I rather see the improvements that I've suggested sooner, and the AI improvements later.

I briefly tried playing with the BETA 1.13 on Wednesday on the WW2 Pacific Scenario. As Japan, I saw the corruption in Bangkok (where the fp is) go to almost nil, but Hue, Saigon, and Phnom Pehn were virtually unchanged from before in that respect (great, now the fp is a 'super-courthouse'!) So I'll wait some more, and hope, before I continue to play.

Although there are differing opinions in the forum. I believe I speak for a lot of potential players, who were turned off of Civ3 early because of corruption system... a lot of them, I'm sure, haven't looked back. I'm still hopeful, but I'm holding off playing for now. Corruption was bad enough in the vanilla civ3, now with the fp screwed up it's not an enjoyable game for me, anymore. It's more frustrating because it doesn't seem like it would be difficult to fix, it seems like such an obvious problem.

It is encouraging that Tavis, and other designers, are listening to the fans. That's why I'm writing. The game is great, but for this one huge issue, that has remained, and grown, since it's inception. I have my fingers crossed.
 
First, welcome Werewolf!

And after that, I agree to almost everything you wrote! Your article should be mandatory to be read by the developers!

It's a pity, but I don't think that we will see to much changes in the next patches. As I've stated earlier, I guess that the whole game literally has grown too large.
All indicators show, that it has been designed for standard maps with perhaps some 20 cities for a single nation. And since they didn't put in an elaborated algorithm for corruption calculation they made it work the easy way... double the distance, multiply corruption by four (roughly calculated).
And since the codes seem to be very deep in the game mechanism, obviously it is almost impossible to change them easily.
I really fear that we will have to live with this and the small improvements they are working at right now, until Civ4 comes out.

I really hope, that for that game they will put a little bit more effort in all kind of calculations, as they all are very simple in principle. Then, obviously, they learned that those simple calculation rules offered a lot of "exploits" or better, "workarounds" and put in this or that, and now we have the mess.
This stands true for corruption, for combat, for almost everything in the current game.
What really is a pity, because the basic ideas in that game are great!
So, let's all hold our breath, rely on Tavis and the other guys reading our concerns, our anger and our solution proposals and at least learn out of it for Civ4!
 
Originally posted by werewolf
Palace jump: Here's an easy solution. Have the palace jump to the city with the most culture, rather than the most population. That will certainly reduce the frequency of that exploit's use. The palace jump should be a credible strategy early in the game, when one realizes, after exploring a little, their capital isn't quite in the best spot... One can then just build their other cities accordingly eventually disband the initial city. Although the computer can't do this, for the player it still wastes some of it's valuable early years.

I really like this suggestion.
 
I wholeheartedly agree with werewolf (except on the RCP).

To me, Civ has always been all about building up a great empire, actually (I know this may sound weired) even more important than winning the game!
Now there is almost no reason to expand at all other than score and to prevent the AI from settling there.

But again, as werewolf stated, those improvement would require a more sophisticated AI, one that I don't think Firaxis can give us at the moment (since they can't even deliver a smooth LAN-experience).

As it is now, I stopped playing besides a few PBEMs. Luckily I'm busy anyways, so this is actually a good thing for me, even though I would have liked to play a "little" game on the side. But not like this! :mad:

While it is pretty obvious that this is primarily a money-issue (a certain number of programmers forced to deliver a certain amount of titles every year), I wonder if this is really the profitable way. Civilization I started a legacy, virtually EVERYBODY was playing it (at least of the people I know). Now you still have your fairly strong fan base that Firaxis can milk (with people like me, who will eventually even buy Civ4 despite all the bad experience), but from what I gather, that's about it. Here in Germany, the biggest game magazine (GameStar) didn't even have PTW or C3C in the "upcoming titles" section. Yes, there was a review but only a little one compared to some other games/updates. Sure, the computer industry changed during the years, as did the "audience". There has been certain tendencies (e.g. away from adventures toward RPGs; from turn-base to real-time strategy), but I strongly believe that Civ could have been a much greater success had it evolved as well.

Ups, I see Commander Bello posted a reply as well. - Just one thing: I wouldn't count on any major improvements. And from the impression that I have of Firaxis I expect Civ4 to have just as many and severe issues. I will certainly not hold my breath to see any improvements.
 
I guess to deal with the corruption problem in the case of huge empires it would have to be solved (as in reality) by including some distributed government structure into the game. I could imagine however that it could be possible to somehow divide your empire into some "districts" with some kind of (appropriately expensive on money and citizens) local governments (instead or in addition to FP? I don't know).
Eg., you could build in any city a district government office (first the building let's say), it would take 4 citizens (government officers) from that city to work properly, it would take some amount of money depending on size of the district as expenses on the government. This would decrease the corruption in that region and you would collect the gain in the capital. This could allow you to further build maybe some more improvements to cope with the corruption problem.
Of course, the effect of this improvement should be strongly dependent on the type of government (I guess it would be a crucial characteristic of the government type how centralized it is and how the local districts behave under each government type). I could even imagine then the possibility of rebelions and civil wars among the districts (let's say you develop the districts under a democratic system, you switch to fascism and, oups, the further districts choose to split, join other democracy, whatever. In the case of war getting the city with the local government office would sure lead to chaos in that district's cities....
Sure, I doubt that this would be implemented in the next week's patch...:D

Of course I would also put everywhere my "truck drivers" although nobody obviously liked this little idea of mine...:cry:
 
I don't mind the corruption myself... it works against massive expansion and provides a constant instability. Perhaps my only gripe would be having massive corruption in the modern age. The Internet wonder should decrease corruption (not so much because it is The Internet; more because it represents mass telecommunication).
But otherwise, the corruption seems, in my mind, to reflect better on reality so I haven't a problem with it.
 
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