Official Corruption Solutions Thread

[Neo Guderian]

I utilize the Checkerboard Expansion strategy alot on Diety and on small map games. This gives the maximum amount of cities in the smallest possible area. IT also gives you a great infrastructure early on...

I found that when I had 20 or more cities that building those cities up is nearly impossible. So I decided to put those workers to work! Build LOTS of workers, with high food producing interrior cities with granaries, move them to the outlying cities and 'join city' until its lvl 6 and then rushbuild whatever you need (under despotism). So you can practically build all the improvments you need as soon as you get the techs with a reliable flow of workers.

My current game employes this strategy along with the Pope Strategy and it has been very successful against the ai (Rush building Colesiums and such early on does a number on near proximity ai civs).

I will test this further on diety tonight =)

 

[AWAD]

Originally posted by Neo Guderian
This belongs on the ideas forum but what the heck.

I agree with a proposal for putting in a 'governance' slider and perhaps bringing in some sort of govermental things such as provincial capitals, agencies(or even special units like actually building FBI units that reduce a percentage of corruption for per unit.) of course that would be a tangent but this is a brainstorm. the best solution i think would be to incorporate an automatic anticorruption/waste mechanism based upon technology levels, cultural levels and such.

This idea with what Nostromo80130 said about England made me think, Just throwing meat out there.

Beaurcratic slider. Think about all the empires that died from within. Using this a basis of the idea. Make it where as you crank this up the outlying locations do well "fringes of empire" but the "heart of empire" suffers.

Idea
Level 1- for every 5 citizens, one becomes unhappy, every 10 commerce loose 1
Level 2- as level 1 but add every 5 shields loose 1
Level 3- as 1+2 but loose 2 food, and and one happy becomes content
Level 4- for every 5 citzens, onebecomes unhappy, one happy becomes content, 5 commerce loose 1, 5 shields loose 2, loose 2 food.

Notice is this does not affect lesser cities as much. They are not carrying the burden of empire. A big city with 20 population may suddenly run into all kinds of issues.

So what ya think.

AWAD- need to go to bed, DTW to Reno and back in less than 30 hours.

 

[MorningStar]

I found that building cultural improvements (i.e. Temples/Cathedrals, Library/University) reduces corruption in colonies, although it will never be as good as the mainland. Make sure every colonial city is connected by a harbor or airport to the mainland.

 

[nicketzsche]

Would someone please be as generous as to enlighten those of us that are unsure of what the "magic" numbers are concerning the max number of cities you may have on each map size before corruption grows. Be clear please as to if it goes mad after the sizes given or when that size is reached. Thanks!

 

[NoLongerTrippin]

I don't know if this has been posted, but since I don't use armies (I find them pretty ****ty), I think it would be possible to make serveral palaces (under different names) with the three small wonders that pertain to armies. You get three more forbidden palaces at the loss of improving armies, and since one doesn't seem to work for the player (the heroic epic), one of them for sure isn't a loss. Decreasing their cost to 10 shields also would help... since it will take ten turns anyway to build it (just don't rush it, and you really aren't abusing it's decreased cost).

I haven't tried this yet in a game though, but it "should" work.

 

[Yeti]

Nicket:

One way to tell for sure is to load up the Civ Editor, pull down menus till you find use standard rules and disable it, then move left on the pull down menus (I forget what it's called) and look in the rules settings. On the world size tab it shows the default optimal number of cities by world size. I looked. I forgot... I'll try to be close:

Small - 12
Normal - 18
Large - 24
Huge - 32

(is that what the world sizes were?) It was SOMETHING like that, but the only one of those numbers that I'm pretty confident of was the 32 cities for a huge world.

And MORE importantly, from my own experience in game (I checked at the time and then counted my cities) it appears that corruption gets gradually worse as you go past that point. It isn't like falling off a cliff or the sudden trigger of a binary - corruption on/off. It's more like a 120% of optimal number of cities, so corruption is 20% worse, but it doesn't even seem that bad actually.

 

[tetley]

Food doesn't corrupt. That's what I do--go hard food, and milk those corrupt towns for their population. First I hurry a grainery (cost: 2 citizens) and then these towns become my Worker & draftee producers. Sometimes hurry military units, depending on the situation--shoot, Modern Armor usually only costs 5 citizens. I guess if you're a democracy/non-religious, all you can do is draft and sell--to someone who will also find it useless, of course.

 

[Peteus]

And don't discount luxuries just because the happy faces don't DIRECTLY affect corruption/waste. 8 total luxuries I believe. With a marketplace that's 2+(2*6) = 14 smilies, which can help a lot in maintaining WLTK days.

Actually it's much more than that...8 luxuries with a marketplace nets you 1+1+2+2+3+3+4+4 = 20 happy faces!!

Improvements and connection to capitol aren't the answer, although they may help. My first Normal Map game (eventually won by domination) featured size 20 cities with all happiness improvements (rushed with gold or "IFE"), courthouse, harbour, Democracy, and WLTK (in fact everyone was happy)...but the corruption was still 98%!! That's just stupid.

Infinite Forest Exploitation is the best existing answer to your corrupt cities' lack of the production necessary to max the culture of your empire. That's very much too bad, because it means that the more you micromanage your workers, the better you do. 200 workers working on IFE is not enough, in a 60+ city empire, especially if your civ happens not to be industrious. That provides a means to exploit the AI (who doesn't do it), and steals some of the fun from the game. I don't like exploits...

In my next game I'll try keeping my empire compact, but I fear that I'll lose the culture race to an expanding AI on a larger continent, who builds Temple+Library+Cathedral+University in 30 cities while I only have 16! That was happening to me in my last game - I only had 2/3 of the Babylonian's culture, despite haveing most of the Wonders in my capitol! Solution...Tanks + Artillery!

 

[Drphil]

Originally posted by eMarkM
I've always have a militiristic/expansionist bent in Civ2 and still want to play that way in Civ3. Obviously the new corruption system in place is designed to make conquest much harder by making your newly aquired cities next to useless.
e

NO! sorry to be offtopic on corruption by Civ3 has made despostic conquest extremely easy by allowing you to rush build by "spending" population instead of money. The far flung city your immortals took over only producing at 1sh/turn? who cares? For cities that have at least one 3-food square you'll be cranking out an immortal once every 5-6 turns. Using this stategy I found the GOTM with the Persians to be extremely easy to beat (5 civs small? map) well before 1000AD. I've now restarted the game and am trying to tame the corruption beast and go for a more "civilized" win. I have 10 cities on the starting continent - half producing at 1sh/turn, am just about to attain democracy and am about 100 turns away from a forbiddon palace in the south; so we'll see. I've kept the other civs at bay with the occasional war with immortals - but I raze their cities instead of take them over - this has given me loads of workers (slaves) who can be used to rush build stuff.

 

[eyrei]

I am starting to think that artillery is the answer to everything!

 

[jyeung]

I have a city which is of size 12 ( I captured it), and I have built a courthouse there. However, there is no improvement. There are 25 commerce and 24 are wasted same with sheilds, one is only saved. How'd do I improve this situation?

 

[LeSphinx]

jyeung

Build the small wonder Forbiden Palace in this cities (Pop of 12) or in a city near which have a better production.
Then , I will be Ok for this cities and all the other around...


LeSphinx

 

[Nelson Minar]

One thing I've noticed - I'll have a city at max corruption (1 shield) and build a courthouse. Not much good is done immediately. But I come back 20 turns later or so and now it's about 6 shields (out of a possible 12). This under a Democracy with a really happy populace.

Maybe the anti-corruption effects of the courthouse accumulate over time?

Regardless, the equations seem out of whack to me, and I hope Firaxis modifies it with a patch. As it stands, the only viable option to even build a courthouse in the firstplace is to do the cheesy build forest / cut forest thing with workers.

 

[nikitos]

Hey this just occured to me. I was playing last night a game where i took over a half of a 1 continent world with my palace/FP being on the west side and the east side were large towns that i had conquered with my massive cavalry army. -as a sidenote cavalry/knights/riders rule since you in principle are not going to lose a lot of them during a war due to their 'escapability'..After i throw a bunch of them on a town they will all go into it after i capture it and heal at the same time as squelching the partisan resistance. Anyway..all of these cities are large (7-12) size mostly as they once were the mighty french and chines empires. <evil laugh> MUAHAHAHA </evil laugh>. They all produce 1 shield and 1 commerce, no matter that they have a courthouse or that they are in a democracy. I find that wasting my money to build anything other than culture improvements is a waste, so I have found a good use for them as worker builders. Workers are cheap to build and to rush and you can use the town's sole positive contribution (food) to this effect very nicely. I never build workers in my main empire now and these massively produced new workers are great for RR building, jungle clearing and city populating. So while i have no solution for corruption itself, these far away cities still build up my culture score and provide me with all the workers i'll ever want.


As a sidenote, putting all your workers on 'autopilot' sometimes results in 50 or more gathering in one square twiddling their thumbs while there is work to be done everywhere around them, and sometimes they neglect pollution too. so have a couple of 'personal assistants' for those weird times when the ai glitches.

 

[Beeblbrox]

Just to make a small historical accuracy point about how pants this excessive corruption is...

Hong Kong? British colony until about 4 years ago. A mere 15,000 miles from London. Anybody want to defend the corruption principal by saying this wasn't a productive colony?

 

[Peteus]

I haven't seen Firaxis defending the corruption model based on realism. It should be clear to anyone that suggesting a remote colony under a representative government with modern communications and every precaution in place could never do better than about 98% corruption - well, that's just silly.
My sense is that they implemented it to force people to play a less warmongering, more perfectionist style. Uncontrollable corruption along with cities turning back over to the enemy (again uncontrollable) definitely makes world domination difficult!

I think what we are finding though, is that players don't like it this way. And hey, the customer's always right, eh? A few appologists argue that we should play within the rules of the game, and escape the shackles of our Civ II experience. I'm ambivalent about that argument.

I do know that having to spend 200 worker cycles foresting and cutting a tile to force some production into a just-captured remote enemy capitol, and then having it spontaneously turn back over to the enemy civ for no good reason despite a massive garrison of my elite "Petes Guards" and an army general who has been faithful to me for 1000 years...that makes me curse at my uncaring PC and bruise my hand on the desk. This in itself is sufficient reason to tweak these "features."

Oh, and I don't consider forestry (intense micromanaging) or razing cities that I could/should hold (despotic brutality) to be good solutions to the corruption problem. I don't mind it being there as an cruicial consideration at all. There should just be a more desirable solution available to us.

 

[eyrei]

My only problem with corruption is the exagerrated claims people make about cities producing only 1 shield and 1 commerce no matter what they do to improve it. This is bull****! I can get any city, no matter how far from my capital and no matter what nationality its citizens, to produce about 40-50% of its commerce and shields. Granted it takes 20+ turns and quite a bit of money, but it does happen.

I can see where this might cramp the style of warmongers, and I do occasionally play a game with only war in mind, but if this is the case, just boost the ideal number of cities in the editor so high that you really don't have to worry so much about corruption.
I am irritated because all this whining and complaining has probably convinced the folks at Firaxis to tone down corruption in the patch, and unless I somehow get to pick and choose which parts of the patch I want, I will have to decide between the enjoyment I get from the challenge of empire management,and fixing the things like air superiority which seem to actually be broken, not just difficult.

I apologize if this offends anybody, but does nobody like a good challenge anymore?

 

[Peteus]

Bah!

You're simply wrong, eyrei! You must not have played a normal map with 60+ cities spread around the world, I assume. On Democracy, with a courthouse, WLTKD, 1950ish, size 15 cities far from the capitol and forbidden palace were observed to be producing 1 production + 30 waste.

I was able to help by biting the bullet and moving my 5000 year old palace, but that ended up costing me a cultural victory! That's kind of stupid too.

There is a small chance that I've overlooked some sort of cumulative effect that an old courthouse or a long WLTKD celebration might have... if so - document it!

 

[nikitos]

Uhmm.. I dont know what game you're playing, but on a normal map on the other side of the world I have a size 15 city with 28 production, out of which 27 is wasted. I have a courthouse, all the cultural buildings rushed, the whole area 'worked on', and a bunch of luxuries and a railroad connected to it. Guess what 1 shield, 1 commerce. I am a democracy btw.

 

[dragontail]

Originally posted by eyrei
I can get any city, no matter how far from my capital and no matter what nationality its citizens, to produce about 40-50% of its commerce and shields. Granted it takes 20+ turns and quite a bit of money, but it does happen.

I can see where this might cramp the style of warmongers, and I do occasionally play a game with only war in mind, but if this is the case, just boost the ideal number of cities in the editor so high that you really don't have to worry so much about corruption.

If you don't have the corruption problem, that's because you don't have so many cities. Going into a war is one of the many ways to play the game, there no right or wrong about being a warmonger. However, ppl should not be encouraged to raze an enemy city or be punished for taking over the city. We play by the rules yet we complain about the rules, I suppose you do the same in the real world, or do you?