I also feel that inflation is a much bigger subject due to a great many factors and that it should be much more subject to numerous civic selection effects as a whole.
Agreed, but the underlying formula really needs a tweak, at least as a stopgap, so that hurrying can function as a viable money sink.
With the current formula, whenever you hurry something, you get a fixed increase of 1gpt to your inflation for an amount of time depending on how many times you hurried stuff recently. The problem is that the game uses "How much hurry inflation you're currently suffering" as a lazy shorthand for "how many times you hurried stuff recently". (There are other ways to think about the inflation system, but in my opinion this is the one which makes the most intuitive sense and is probably what Firaxis had in mind.)
This means that if you hurry something when your inflation is already high, then you don't just get an extra point of inflation which lasts for hundreds of turns:
that ancient hurry penalises you every time you something else during those hundreds of turns, by making the inflation caused by those later hurries last longer. This causes a vicious cycle: since the inflation from those later hurries lasts longer, it penalises more of your future hurries,
even after the inflation directly caused by the original hurry has ended.
If you hurry things too frequently, the inflation which is indirectly caused by that one ancient hurry grows exponentially as the game goes on, rather than shrinking. If you do the maths, it turns out that "too frequently" means "more than once every 5 turns (at normal speed)." In vanilla civ, it's rarely possible to hurry things that often over a sustained period without hurting your science, so the inflation formula works. But in C2C it's easy to get enough income to hurry things way more often than that, because many buildings which would have generated commerce in vanilla instead give gold.
I have two practical suggestions for how the inflation formula could be changed to get rid of this exponential effect, while still keeping the other elements. I'd offer to implement it myself, only I've never modded CIV and tweaking the underlying algorithms seems like a bad place to start.
Suggestion 1: Each time you hurry, inflation increases by 1 for 5n+5 turns, where n is the number of times you clicked the hurry button in the last 50 turns. Adjusted for speed. This would feel almost exactly the same as normal if you only hurry things occasionally - inflation might be slightly higher, but not more than a few gpt. If you hurry things as often as you can, then you'll find yourself hurrying things much more often, but will still get dramatically increasing inflation if you hurry too often.
Suggestion 2: Hurrying increases inflaiton as it currently does. But instead of inflation decreasing by 1 every 5 turns, it decreases to 95% of its current value (rounded down). This will look exactly the same as the current system if you hurry things less than once every 5 turns on average; if you hurry more often than that, then your inflation will be permanently high, but will stabilise at a fixed value of 20x [number of times you hurry things per 5 turns]). I suspect this would be easier to program, since it's just changing a single calculation and doesn't require the game to track when each hurry happened..
