The problem with corruption: defined

[AHO]

My problem with corruption is not simply that it exists, because, to the contrary, I think it poses an excellent challenge to the would-be Empire-Builder, one that was probably met by "real" leaders throughout history. My problem with corruption as a challenge in this game is that there is no viable solution. Once you venture just a few squares away from your capital, (some of you have this measured out precisely--I think it's like 20 squares or so) you can build all the courthouses, police stations, and Forbidden palaces you want, but NOTHING will bring down the 99% corruption. Call me crazy but when I play an Empire-Building game, at some point, I expect to actually be able to build something. Is waiting 80 turns (translation, 800-1600 years) to build a courthouse only to find out that it had absolutely no effect anybody's idea of fun?

Some people are modifying the editor to give other buildings, such as a bank, corruption reducing effects, but I argue that one shouldn't have to edit a game's rules just to make it tolerable. What these "editors" are trying to do is something that Firaxis needs to address in the next installment: create a working recourse for corruption. In history, what did Caesar do, or, what did Alexander do? Build a courthouse? Send in an army? Execute the governor? They must have done something because there were Greek libraries in Egypt, and there are still Roman aqueducts and baths all over Europe. Did Hadrian wait 1000 years for his wall?

Again, I don't complain that corruption exists, and I don't even complain that it's too high, it's just that the player has no recourse to correct it. I don't mind a challenge, I just want to be able to find a solution, and when I find it, I want it to actually work.

What's the point of working a puzzle if it has no solution?

[Pyrodrew]

And that's with the patch?

[SithUK]

AHO: 100% agree!

I love empire building games and couldn't wait for the release of Civ3 (been civing since the original civ). I no longer play Civ3 for the simple reason that its no longer an empire building game due to the absolutly cripling effect that the corruption in Civ3 is set at.

I wasn't ranting about corruption when I got my hands on Civ3. Rather I decided to play it for a week or two to make my mind up. Well its made up. I have stopped playing because it isn't fun for me. I'm not saying its not possible to enjoy this game because I'm sure lots of people do. I'm simply saying that for myself, as an empire builder, it is no fun.

I'm hoping that an upcoming patch will add a slider/option to the game creation that allows us to set corruption at Civ2 levels (I enjoyed building a great empire in Civ2 and even in Civ1). I don't mind if they leave the corruption in but make it an OPTION for those of us who like empire building games (which Civ3 in its current form is anything but).

Thanks,

Sith

[art_vandelai]

There's absolutely no reason why a police station shouldn't cause a reduction in corruption. I don't see why Firaxis didn't include this in the patch - otherwise there really isn't much point in building police stations.

In the real world, cops don't prevent legitimate dissent and unhappiness among the population - they prevent crime (=c correuption) and maintain law and order in the civilaization).

Could you imagine a real world where 95% of Hawaii's production was lost to corruption just because it's so far away from Washington?

[AHO]

Exactly, Art! Can one really argue that Hawaii has more corruption than Washington DC because it's further away and off the continent?


But even if you want to make it part of the game, let me be able to BUILD something in Hawaii to counter these effects. Someone has just suggested being able to put a Great Leader in your far flung cities to reduce corruption. Great! I love it! Keep 'em coming! But please, Firaxis, listen to your customers!!!!!

[Segal]

Hmmm, very true.

To have a representative model, in a Democratic government, corruption should be highest at the Capital and decrease as you get further away.

[HawaiiFive-O]

With the patch, Police Stations DO reduce corruption.

And everyone knows that Hawaii loses 95% of its production due to the perfect weather, sandy beaches, and warm water.

Not from corruption.



Hey, surf's up! Guess I'll call in sick today. Anyone who's been a manager (or for that matter, an employee) in Hawaii will know what I mean...

[Nadexander]

I totally agree. I think the real kicker though is that corruption is solely determined by distance. It makes no distinction between conquering far flung neighbors and dominating with military rule (expected high corruption) or a city that happens to be a bit far away but is an ancient and well integrated part of a civilization with a high culture rating. Compare the distant cities on the mongol empire having very high corruption but san francisco desnt have any more corruption than washington dc. This would make it possible to build a a large empire over time, but it would make it harder to steam-roll the enitre world in a conquering spree.

[Jumping Choya]

This is kindof off the top of my head, but the idea of a city's corruption being reduced over time seems to make sense to me. As it gets settled in and a more orderly structure is established, corruption and waste would decrease.

Opinions?

[Jumping Choya]

Ah, crud. Double post, and it won't let me delete.

[art_vandelai]

I think corruption should be more influenced by being near other civs and by culture points of opposing civs in the city.

For example, a city that was recently taken over would be almost entirely corrupt, until your culture is equal to the previous owner's culture in that city, when it would be 50%, and continue to decline from there.

Similarly, corruption would also be impacted in a small way from the accumulated culture of neighboring cities (i.e. a Roman city surrounded by Greeks would be more corrupt than a city at the heart of the empire)

Being on a different continent should also be a contributing factor, but away from your home continent you're more likely to have other civs around you, so corruption would still be high when building cities on a contient away from home.

[Cypselus]

Corruption should also decrease as communications improve. Speedier travel and communications increase a ruler's reach. It's much harder to rip off the king when his agents are in constant contact with you and can make a surprise visit on the afternoon flight. Technologies like railroads, computers, and flight should all serve to increase the reach of the capital city. Police stations, airports, and courthouses should all decrease waste and corruption. But base corruption is still too high anyway; the notion that any city more than x distance away from your capital will produce nothing, regardless of what you do is neither plausible, historically accurate, nor fun.

[YC4B4U]

I agree with the idea that advances in communication technology should reduce the corruption effects.

I like a game where I can build an empire over time, and still have land to settle later in the game. If expansion is hindered by corruption (to the AI as well) then this situation can occur. If technology reduces corruption - then the larger the empire can become over time (and not because I stopped pumping out settlers).

Propoganda can work much the same. Decreasing chance of Propoganda takeovers with increasing communications technology.

[AzureFlame]

Originally posted by Cypselus
Corruption should also decrease as communications improve. Speedier travel and communications increase a ruler's reach. It's much harder to rip off the king when his agents are in constant contact with you and can make a surprise visit on the afternoon flight. Technologies like railroads, computers, and flight should all serve to increase the reach of the capital city. Police stations, airports, and courthouses should all decrease waste and corruption. But base corruption is still too high anyway; the notion that any city more than x distance away from your capital will produce nothing, regardless of what you do is neither plausible, historically accurate, nor fun.

YES!!! Brilliant, that's exactly how it should work! Corruption should stay as is (1.16f) for Ancient Era, then the distances and max cities should increase by 25% in each era. Would keep the empires smaller initially and allow them to grow over time as communication and transport improves.

[SSBLoveU]

I am making much more gold with cities far away. Yet, transportation cost and maintenance have skyrocketed.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by art_vandelai
In the real world, cops don't prevent legitimate dissent and unhappiness among the population - they prevent crime (=c correuption) and maintain law and order in the civilaization).

That's hysterical.

Never heard of the Red Squads, huh? The police riots in Seattle, Philly, LA, and Genoa just passed you by? Police assassinations of Black Panthers in their beds, Bull Conner unleashing the dogs on Black children marching for freedom, the Chicago police Memorial Day Riot in1937, the Haymarket Police Riot . . .

[Harlan]

I think this thread doesn't completely define the problem with corruption.

Start with the intention of the producers. I believe they wanted to limit the number of cities a player could make, esp. to get rid of the ICS stategy. This was their solution - the idea being, far off cities would have so much corruption that you'd keep to a small, tight empire for most of the game.

Unfortunately, in practice this turned out to be a complete failure (and where was the playtesting???). First reason why is the behavior of the AI. The AI builds new cities like a maniac, putting them in any and every available space. So the human player has to follow suit or get left behind.

Second problem is that there is no penalty for making or conquering a bunch of completely corrupt cities, so people naturally do it in order to win. The smart strategy is also very frustrating to play.

Even if corruption were lessened, and there were more effective ways to mitigate it, that still wouldn't be good, because the problem it was meant to solve, unchecked growth, would actually be even worse.

What's needed is a complete rethink, a totally different way to limit your civ's expansion until later in the game. One of two things are needed (or both), together with a mellower version of the corruption effect.

First, have empire size penalties that effect your entire civ, not just one outlying city. If your ENTIRE civ got too corrupt if you built more than X number of cities, that would make you think twice about continued expansion (provided the AI is smart enough to recognize limits as well). Better than corruption would be unhappiness penalties. This was actually one thing CTP got right.

The second would simply be a hard limit: beyond a certain number of cities, you couldn't found any new cities (or build new Settlers, to prevent the stockpiling of them). You could conquer them though, but these conquests would suffer culture, unhappiness, corruption and other problems, limiting the amount of feasible conquest till the end of the game. This also makes much more sense as a limit to ICS, since one current strategy is to tightly pack lots of cities right around your capital.

Ideally, both of these limits would change with different governments, and also with new technologies (esp. those related to communications as pointed out above), so your empire could grow larger over time without too much cost. By the end of the game, all limits would be removed enough so that a complete world conquest would be reasonably doable. Throughout the game, there would tend to be waves of expansion followed by periods where civs would improve the quality of existing cities.

These changes could solve all kinds of problems with the game. For instance, large parts of the world would still be unoccupied later in the game, making the Explorer unit actually useful. The barbarian threat would last much longer, instead of abruptly ending so soon. It would also completely change the costs and benefits of razing cities - you'd be much more likely to keep them. Or you could go on wars of pillaging and destruction if you'd reached your growth limit and you still wanted to fight. Building colonies would make sense. Colonies would actually be useful and frequently used, since there would be costs to plopping a city there instead. The AI would know when to stop producing Settlers that have nowhere to settle, and naturally make much more intelligent choices, instead of only "expand till you drop". I could go on and on with all the positive effects this would have.

In short by making these changes, the sun would come out, poverty and evil would be eliminated worldwide, and Firaxis would win the Nobel Prize for Computer Gaming. Seriously, it would help the game tremendously, and return the game to what it seems the original intention was.

If Firaxis doesn't want to make these changes, they should at least provide the editing flexibility so others could make the fixes the game really needs.

[Mannamagnus]

Great ideas Harlan! I hope some Firaxian reads them.

[AHO]

You're absolutely on the money regarding the designed limits to expansionism, and I think it's one of the great ironies of this game. In the "ask the civ team" section of the Civ3 website, Firaxis addresses this and states plainly that the desired strategy for this game is to create a smaller, more compact, efficient empire rather than a monestrously sprawling one. This is fine and I would enjoy playing such a game; however, this strategy has not been programmed into the AI!

[AHO]

You know, Harlan, I'm sitting here thinking about your excellent observation and suggestion and, it occurs to me that while the Civ game concept has evolved into this game we call Civ3, the AI's strategy has not evolved with it. It seems that I'm trying to play Civ3 while the AI is still playing Civ2.

[Ralf]

Originally posted by AHO
My problem with corruption as a challenge in this game is that there is no viable solution.

The corruption-levels has been tuned down to more reasonable levels, after the patch. If they lower the overal corruption even further in upcoming patches, the whole thing becomes pointless.

As for the courthouse being pointless, I dont agree. In a medium-sized 6-8 pop-city, under monarchy, far away from your capitol-city, they immediately provides you with 3-4 extra shields per turn, that otherwise would be wasted. Also, remember that the benefits of the courthouse is 3-folded:

1/ Less change of city-defection & successful foreign propaganda
2/ Less shields wasted.
3/ Less trade wasted.

The combined benefits makes courthouses just about worthwhile. Perhaps they should add a fourth benefit as well?

I assume that you always build the very useful "forbidden city" mini-wonder. If you think that wonder is too expensive, just open the CivMod editor and tune down the shield-costs from 300 shields to, lets say 200 shields - or even lower, if you prefer that.

[Harlan]

AHO,
Its interesting that you say the Civ3 website specifically talks about having a contained empire. Everything points in that direction, except how the game actually plays out! But if the AI changed its behavior, that wouldn't be enough. The current system still behooves the player to play a certain strategy that is less fun then if the game had the right checks and balances on growth. People will generally play the style that is the most effective, even if it is less fun - note the use of the mindless "lumberjacking" technique by many, for instance.

[Marko Polo]

I agree with Harlan and Aho that the Firaxian intention of promoting a tight compact empires by adding "max cities per world size" with it's corruption effect is badly broken. Especially because the AI is so aggressive doing ICS (Infinite City Strategy) itself.

Remember, in Civ2 the AI was very bad at expansion and human ICS was very powerful. Now it's vice versa with AI ICS:ing and that flawed "max cities" constraint of prohibiting the human doing the same. So Harlan had an excellent point of this being a serious design flaw. Further, I strongly concur his ideas to counter this problem.

I like building large empires as many others do. It's nice to look at the map and plan where to build those specialized cites: SSC (super science city), high production wonder building city, a worker building cities, luxury/recourse securing cities, militarily strategical defense/outpost cities, "culture bomb" cities hoping to get nearby AI cities defect to my side and so on.

Now, this awful corruption is taking all the fun of playing a game like this. Building anything with only one shield is really pain in the ass. The means now available to counter this (the former IFE:ing, pop rushing etc.) are surely not fun nor realistic. I wonder who would disagree me with this?

So what do I do? I simply edit "civ3mod.bic" file, section "world size" and optimal city # per world size. I multiply by ten each of those figures. The result? I get Civ2 like corruption where corruption is still an issue in those far away territories where half of my production/commerce is lost. The good thing however is that building courthouse/police station will effectively counter the corruption problem even in those far-away outpost cities.

Given that this tweak benefit the AI civs as well doesn't give me a guilty conscience of "cheating". Sincerely, I have just found the means to counter this quite widely agreed design flaw of corruption based on "max cities" concept. In fact, this flaw is so serious that it has caused some players stop playing Civ3 altogether. Very bad indeed, because Civ3 IS a good game and I still believe that Firaxis is doing hard work to fix it to be even better!

In conclusion, with this tweak I make the game more enjoyable for me. And yes, building my large empire is actually fun now! If they just implemented the stacked movement, the game would be good enough for me. Being realistic, we can never have all the features we want..

[cavebear]

I think it is very revealing that, in so many of these threads, the solution to a problem is not a strategy but a software "tweak". It shows how seriously the game is flawed in design and testing.

Why on Earth should we all have to create personal versions of the game through adjusting the editor? In a very short time, none of us will be able to discuss game strategies because everyone will be playing a slightly different game! Player A has reduced corruption rates, Player B has altered shield requirements for building Wonders, Player C has changed unit strengths, etc...

Is it a deliberate ploy to prevent players from comparing notes and developing actual gameplay strategies? Or is it just lack of attention to detail?

There is an immense difference between testing software to see if it operates properly and testing software to see if it is worth using. I'm afraid we have a clear case of the former here.

I've returned to playing Civ2 (though I will keep trying civ3 ocassionally and watching for improvment patches). Hey, I *want* the game to work right! There is a lot of promise to it, just poor actuality.