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!
(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!
Last edited:
