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.