Can Someone Explain Corruption Without the Maths?

steoc4 · January 16, 2004, 22:36

Ok I've been reading the patch info and the various debates about corruption and alexman's 'everything you need to know' thread and it's just giving me a headache!
Can someone please explain in terms of standard gameplay where exactly is the best place to put a forbidden palace? People were talking about having two cores and such, but I just expand whatever way the land takes me, and into the territory of whoever I end up at war with. Maybe I should plan the way I expand more, but I think I should be placing my forbidden palace to fit my nation, not shaping my nation to fit the forbidden palace.

vmxa1 · January 16, 2004, 23:14

Here is my take and could easily be wrong. Essentially in CivIII and PTW you had corruption based on distance and OCN. This allowed cities to be ranked by distances. When you build the FP it acted as a palace for ranking cities from its location.

So if you had the FP, you could have two cores of cities with good or low levels of corruption as impacted by distance. The OCN would have to not be exceeded to get max benefits. Those far away and once you got more tha the OCN allowed got more less total corruption.

C3C made an attemp to correct this as apparently it was not intended that you have a second core of very low corruption cities. RCP placement became an art form to subvert corruption.

This ended up being a cure that was akin to tossing out the baby with the bath water and attempts are being made to modify the corruption (patches 1.12/13 & 15).

Now if I have things correct (more or less) up to this point, let me toss out what I think is the current plan.

With 1.15 you will get a boost to the OCN from an FP. This of course is good for corruption with larger empires. The FP will provide a reduction of corruption for the second core of cities, but not to the level that it use to or as the palace does.

So in short you would benefit form an FP some where in the middle of what would otherwise be good cities, but not so far from the capitol that the distance will over come the FP effects.

IOW you do not want to drop an FP on the otherside of the map as you used be able to and expect big results.

alexman · January 16, 2004, 23:44

This is how things stand with the 1.15 patch (1.15 was the last number I'll use in this post, I promise!

)

Your cities get two kinds of corruption: corruption due to distance from your closest Palace, and corruption due to number of cities.

The farther away you build your cities from your Palace, the more corruption they have. Also, the more cities placed between a city and your capital, the more corruption that city has.

So what does the Forbidden Palace do?

First of all, it acts like a Palace for distance corruption. Cities close to the Palace, or close to the Forbidden Palace, have low corruption due to distance.

However, the Forbidden Palace does NOT count as a Palace when you are counting the number of cities between your Palace and a given city. Instead, it affects corruption due to number of cities in a different way: it decreases the corruption due to number of cities by a fixed percentage throughout your empire, no matter where you build it.

So where do you build the Forbidden Palace?

First of all, no matter where you build it, your empire will always be better off. However, maximizing the efficiency of your empire with the FP is a different story.

The exact location does not matter, as long as you don't have too many cities between your Palace and your Forbidden Palace. You want to place it close enough to your Palace that there are not too many cities between it and the Palace, and far enough so that you get two low-corruption areas. Placing the Forbidden Palace in a neighboring former AI capital will often work relatively well. But even placing it on a different continent will be fine, as long as you don't have many cities in your home continent. Remember, all cities near the Forbidden Palace have low corruption due to distance. As long as they don't have too much corruption due to number of cities, they should have relatively low corruption, although not as low as the cities around the Palace, of course.

Hope this helps.

Theseus · January 16, 2004, 23:45

Pretty good, vxma1.

There is also another approach:

Put your FP in a good central position to your mid-game core cities (different than early game); you'll get the OCN boost immediately. Bolster the core cities with various corruption/happiness building. Build a new Palace, perhaps via GL, in a new and forward position.

And also:

Consider that you may want to relo your Palace, instead, to that central position for a mid-game core... what does that mean for the placement of the FP?

Forget the math! "FP ASAP, but Palace better than FP." Solve that logical equation.

vmxa1 · January 17, 2004, 00:50

Thanks I felt relief after seeing alexmans post. It seems I was not too far off. Anything I know about it I learned for the corruption master. I figued he did not want to make me look to bad as we have been teamates twice now.

MrWhereItsAt · January 17, 2004, 08:25

I would like to add that if you have your Palace on a smallish landmass (as you will find in Archipelago-based maps), and have filled the space up, you can build your Forbidden Palace on any new landmass you like and it will be as good as anywhere else. This is because if you have filled up one island with your Palace in it, then putting a new central area around your FP halfway around the world is as good as putting it on a new island a smaller distance away from your home island. The reason for all this is that the number of your Palace-centric cities is FIXED once you have filled it up.

There are the essential three things (as outlined very well by alexman above) that affect corruption for your FP-centric cities: the Optimal City Number (corruption from this starts to really kick in if you build too many cities, so try not to); the number of cities closer to the Palace or "rank" corruption (which is now dependent only on where you put the cities around the FP), and the distance to your FP (distances will be small between your FP-centric cities and the FP city). Thus if all your FP cities are far from the Palace cities, it does not matter how far from your Palace cities they are - the rank corruption will be the same.

I hope I have not CONFUSED things for you.