Corruption Paradox

[manhattan82]

as Civ3 has clearly demonstrated, expansion means higher corruption, which decreases the amount of wealth and production one. now to remedy that, one can construct courthouses or the Forbidden City to eliminate that problem. so obviously if u got a large empire u'd build the Forbidden City towards the other end focal point so that you can reduce the most corruption. unfortunately, building this small wonder can take hundreds of turns because it's in the corruption zone, especially in the larger map sizes. so all in all, when i finally have an empire that i want to turn productive, i still got to wait hundreds of additional years so that the Forbidden City can finally be completed. i guess that's why the Chinese gave up and just built the Forbidden City in their capital!

[N. Machiavelli]

Originally posted by manhattan82
i guess that's why the Chinese gave up and just built the Forbidden City in their capital!

LOL

[Cookie Monster]

I thought I'd throw my experiences with corruption into the mix.

I find that corruption is indeed a problem, even when you have the Forbidden Palace, until the discovery of steam power. If you are able to "mine" the area around a corrupted city and then build RR's on those "mined" you will see that it helps. What happens is a decent percentage of the addition of one shield per RR'ded mined tile is not lost to corruption thereby aiding in the manufacturing output of that city.

It also helps if your government type is either republic or democracy. Communism is a usefull government type when you have a large and spread out empire. For example, if you have cities on multiple continents across the game map communism spread the corruption out evenly throughout your land. What this does is slightly affects the core cities (the ones near the capital) but eases the corruption pains of the rim cities (those very far from the capital). To compensate for the core cities you can build factories and hospitals to boost population and production output. That is the beauty of this game. You must be careful when switching governments. You want to make sure you have the tech to augment the mechanics of the more advanced governments as well as have the infrastructure in place or nearly in place to best maximize the benefits of the switch.

Just my 2 cents.........

[Baz]

I suppose the idea behind beefing up corruption was to make domination harder - huge empires are so riddled with corruption a small but technologically advanced one can fight back.

My solution to the problem:

In the early stages of the game you are out to grab land, and it is here, when under monarchy or despotism with small cities that don't produce much anyway, that the problem can be most acute. You can be left with a swathe of territory that is a useless backwater for centuries, and full of disgruntled foreign subjects to boot, a prime place to lose cities by cultural disaffection. I use my first leader to speed production of the Forbidden Palace in a conquered city - sort of appointing the hero of the war ruler of the conquered territory - your devastated wasteland becomes a thriving little kingdom of its own, and sonn cathches up with your heartlands.

Personally I would like to have more than one Forbidden Palace - give the player the option of building one per 10 cities he owns maybe?

[manhattan82]

i guess you can use a leader to rush, thought i prefer to start building armies, as leaders are hard enough to produce to begin with. i mean i guess widespread corruption does somewhat make sense in early large despotic empires, but i think that there should be a even greater decrease of corruption in the other governments. i dunno if anyone suggested this, but i think age should make a difference as well. as communication and transportation improves and advances, it would allow for a greater connection back to the capital leading to less corruption. also maybe instead of having such high corruption in large empires, another way of producing a "empire effect," would be to have cities with different nationals. by building cities in the other side of the world, perhaps there is a way that the cities would have citizens that are closer to the nationality of the nearby civ, therefore producing the problem of either resistant citizens, or cultural flip. 'cuz just thinking, when the european nations not only conquered, but also built new cities, these colonies eventually revolted and set-up their own nations (not thinking of just Africa, India, but also the US, Canada, Latin and South America, and Australia)

[Arrian]

My first Leader = the Forbidden, almost without fail. Building it in an optimal spot pretty much requires a leader to rush it.

-Arrian

[Willem]

Originally posted by Baz


Personally I would like to have more than one Forbidden Palace - give the player the option of building one per 10 cities he owns maybe?

Try the Civ3CopyTool, you'll be able to make as many as you want. I'm up to about 7 now I think, all based on some societal model e.g. The Supreme Court, The Senate etc. I feel that's the main problem with the corruption model they provided, there aren't enough tools that help you combat it. Same thing with War Weariness. At least if you had to build more things in order to get these aspects under control, it would force you to put some effort into having a large empire, rather than making it virtually impossible.

[Hurry]

The solution is to not expand your empire too much. Instead, make vassal states of the other civs. This way you can get the benefits of a large empire without actually having to control it yourself. Look in the strategy-section for more info about the tactic.