IMHO, great leaders are simply too rare a phenomenon to counteract against a very pervasive problem.
Corruption wasn't a huge issue of mine when I first played the game, but it gets more and more vexing. There is something wrong when you have a few cities that aren't especially far from the capital that are just crippled outposts. There is something wrong when I play a building-friendly civilization like Babylon and all of my fringe cities are taking hundreds or thousands of years to build libraries.
I agree corruption should be a limiting factor on empires. This is particularly true in the ancient era. It is still too much as is, even under those circumstances though. The only reason there should be a possibility of 99% corruption even in the ancient era is when there is a distant colony on some far-off continent.
What is needed is a more widespread and historically accurate solution, particularly for the modern era. Perhaps there should be a minor wonder, a building, centralized economy," "distributed government" or "federalism", that can be built anywhere on a continent and drastically reduce corruption. Maybe even an expensive, dead end tech advance or two would do this.
The forbidden palace isn't good enough--you have to build it far away from your capital, which means that corruption makes it very difficult to build in the first place. Furthermore, if you build it on the same continent as your palace, you can forget any sort of meaningful intercontinental colonization.
BT
