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Where is the Culture Corruption?
I just completed my second game at the Regent level, having spent hours thinking about managing the corruption in my empire. After reading many/most of the postings in these forums for ideas I was much better able to do that the second time round – WLTK, the Forbidden Palace, etc. But now, stepping back from the game, the thing that I cannot understand is the culture corruption. There is none.
I have a size 12 city off on an island. I bought it a harbor, granary, temple, cathedral, and library. It effectively produces one shield and one commerce per turn with the rest all lost to corruption. I can accept this as part of the game, relating it to the British Empire and the Boston Tea Party, etc. The city also produces eight culture ‘notes’ per turn from its improvements. And loses none of them to corruption, just as if they were in my capital city. This I do not understand. If the citizens are refusing to pay their taxes and not effectively working on the projects that the ‘home’ government wants, how is it that they are improving the cultural impact of my civilization at full effectiveness? In historical terms, for example, the Puritan churches in New England were not in full conformance with the directions of the Church of England. In this sort of situation I would expect that some of the city’s culture ‘notes’ would be lost along with the shields and commerce.
In terms of game play this would all be essentially irrelevant if it weren’t for the fact that culture is what drives border expansion. After buying a temple (two notes) and library (three notes) it takes under 20 turns for the new town to accumulate the 100 notes needed to become size three – putting a good chunk of real estate within the boundaries of my empire. I would expect this process of assimilation to be slower on a far off island than with a new settlement right near my capital. My current strategy with this is to centrally locate the island’s town site, buy the culture buildings, wait for expansion, and hope that the world’s uranium supply happens to be concentrated on the island (this time it wasn’t). But I think a more realistic process would be to slow down the accumulation of culture, and hence border expansion, in these cases. This would allow other civilizations to plant their towns as well, before the space was all within the borders of one empire. And it would force the founding of additional colonies to exploit visible resources not yet within the border. Again, in historical terms, think of the small settlements of the English (Massachusetts and Virginia), French (Quebec), Dutch (New Amsterdam/New York), and Spanish (St. Augustine) in North America. It took time for these distant colonies to expand their influence in face of the existing Native cultures, run into each other, and then fight it out for dominance.
There are many posts and discussion about decreasing the corruption levels in Civ 3. I suggest that similar consideration should be given to increasing (introducing) the corruption of culture.
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