Less Corruption mod

[SebT27]

Hi all.

(Version is Conquests 1.22.0.0)

I haven't been here for years, I think: but the other day I got bitten by the CivIII bug again. So, after a couple of (aborted) games, I'm faced again with my one bugbear about this game: corruption.

By corruption, I mean both what is more precisely called corruption (lost trade) and waste (lost shield production). I know that they're calculated subtly differently (especially with WLTKD), but I'll treat them under the same heading. Although I do have different attitudes to each. Some corruption, far away from your capital, makes sense. Waste - some waste - also makes sense. But I think waste is completely overdone in CivIII. It makes far-flung cities - which of course you might like to improve with a Courthouse and/or PoliceStation, for the tax/science $$$$, in time - almost completely useless, except as tax/science farms. And how are they ever going to build that Aqueduct, to make them grow enough to make a Courthouse/CopShop worth it? (yes, I know about Civ Engineers, of course). For their marginal effect once corruption gets high, far from the capital, Courthouses/PSs are buildings I always consider but hardly ever bother with.

My view reflects my play-style. I'm not at all a technically even good player - I don't think I've ever played beyond Regent level. And what I like to do is, simply: Conquer the World. Sometimes I adjust the rules so that Conquest and Domination are disallowed, forcing me into a Space win. And then I utterly enjoy managing this gigantic empire as well as I can, after all the previous fun of winning it from all the other civs. I get my kicks from attacking a civ, taking their cities, and then managing my conquered cities (which, obvs, the rival civ were completely mismanaging) like a boss. Marching into a city and finding that it's now more than half red in the $$$ and Shields rows just kills this fun for me. It seems that the corruption levels in CivIII are almost designed to discourage my "so many cities that each turn takes 40 minutes" play-style.

Sure, there are things you can do. Go Communist. Build the Forbidden Palace and/or Secret Police HQ. But there seems to be a base level of corruption which you just can't escape, and which I think is too high - especially when it governs waste (lost shields) as well as corruption proper (lost trade).

So I've refound alexman's legendary Corruption deep-dive here. And I've made a rough Excel sheet to try to figure out how all these formulas work out in a real game. Still testing it.

Couple of questions, don't know whether anyone can help:

1. I'm playing with my spreadsheet, and found so far that you can make a massive difference to the number of cities you can have by making a .biq and adjusting what the Editor calls the Optimal Number of Cities (see below) - alexman calls it the OCN (Optimal City Number). This value affects rank corruption, but doesn't change distance corruption at all. Has anyone found a way to adjust distance corruption?

2. The hardest thing to work out on my spreadsheet was the interaction between city distance and city rank. I'm using a very rough method, something like the joke about the physicist being asked about dairy production ("Assume a spherical cow of uniform density...").

I'm using an "average distance between cities" parameter, and assuming a set of circles around the capital. So if your Avg Distance Between Cities (ADBC) is 4, then there'll be a circle 4 tiles away from the capital, another 8 tiles away, next one 12 tiles away, and so on. On each of these circles you can place a number of cities, equidistant from the capital and equidistant from each other: how many, I assume, is the radius of the circle divided by ADBC. Each city on a circle does increase the rank number, sometimes arbitrarily if two cities were founded at the same time. (I believe there was an exploit in previous versions, so that you could build cities precisely the same distance from the capital and hack the rank into not increasing - but this is no longer true).

This radius (I am no mathematician) seems to be 8*the tile distance. You can verify this for small numbers on the map: 1 tile away from the capital, there are 8 tiles; 2 tiles away, there are 16, and so on. But I'm not certain about this.

And of course this imaginary set of circles ignores real-map things like bad terrain, sea and so on. I'd love to make this method better - finding a way to incorporate the %Sea on the map (as a parameter) seems to be the obvious improvement, beyond getting my radius and cities-per-circle calculations right. I don't even know what discipline I know nothing about: is it topology, or tesselation, or something I don't even have a name for?

If there are any corruption specialists out there (no, I don't mean our real-world government...), I'd love to read your comments!

 

[Southern_Man]

I do not know the answers to your questions about mods or any suggestions.

I would be very interested in seeing your spreadsheet. I have been toying with the idea of making a spreadsheet so I could calculate the corruption of each city and answer such questions as "would it make sense to build a courthouse here?" I believe there is enough information available within the game to set up a spreadsheet and find the corruption percentage for each city. It would be tedious to use, but I would love to use it for 3-4 games and see if I could develop a better understanding. A lot of parameters to enter and between the upfront work of making sure all the formulas work and the input required during gameplay, I haven't put any real effort into this.

If such a resource already exists in the downloads or tools section of the website, I would love to see that too. I've poked around a little and haven't found anything.

 

[Southern_Man]

Your thread piqued my interest and led to me doing some more querying in the utilities section and I found this resource tool and post it here for other folks to see: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/corruption-waste-calculator.114469/

I've just installed it and it appears to account for all of the mechanics, allowing me to change government and add a courthouse, etc. It is not 100% accurate, but may be directionally accurate enough for me to use, not sure yet. In some cases, it appears the waste is off by one (and sometimes the total production as well). I am not sure what causes this bug, nor the implications for use, but I intend to give it a shot and see how it works out.

I would probably find more learning in programming the spreadsheet myself but I am going to play around with this for a few games anyway.

Anyway, not at all your questions about mods, but maybe it can help you or other readers.

 

[timerover51]

I keep working on the corruption level of the governments, and adding the "reduce corruption" flag to a number of additional buildings. I have been able through this to reduce corruption, but I have not been able to come up with a way of dealing with the distance corruption.

 

[Nathiri]

I dont mind corruption as a mechanic, but I do think the way its implemented, there isnt that much one can do for it and so it makes it just annoying to develop cities that are a few "rings" away from your capital. I think there should be more buildings that help to reduce it. Corruption reducing specialists are an interesting option too, but because of the city size and population restrictions, it doesnt lend itself well. C3X helps alot in this regard as you can increase the city size, then with the editor you can find more ways to make city development interesting.

 

[Android Assembly]

First off, you are in luck - the game has a slider in difficulty settings to reduce *all* kinds of corruption simultaneously in scenario editors.

This is a screenshot from the age of discovery Conquests scenario, which pretty much needed to do this to make settling North America reasonable for the European civs. They would otherwise be dealing with distance corruption across an entire map. The slider goes as far as 0% if you need it too, though I warn that the game is horrifically unbalanced without corruption putting a soft-cap on your production.

 

[SebT27]

First off, you are in luck - the game has a slider in difficulty settings to reduce *all* kinds of corruption simultaneously in scenario editors.

This is a screenshot from the age of discovery Conquests scenario, which pretty much needed to do this to make settling North America reasonable for the European civs. They would otherwise be dealing with distance corruption across an entire map. The slider goes as far as 0% if you need it too, though I warn that the game is horrifically unbalanced without corruption putting a soft-cap on your production.

View attachment 748592

Wow. Great find! And a DOH from me: I saw that slider, obviously, when looking at the "Percentage of optimal cities" setting - but didn't properly see it.

I wonder how that enters into alexman's formulas. My guess would be, that corruption gets calculated as per his formulas, and then this setting is applied to the result.

I agree that no corruption at all would be a bad idea: the first civ to become significantly larger than the others would probably snowball and become unstoppable.