09-11-2001 00:58									#1
	Retake on Corruption Get a bigger avatar today!

Why is this incredibly high level of corruption in the game?

The two tacks I've seen taken by people trying to defend it are that it was implemented to stop ICS, or that it realistically reflects corruption in large historical empires.

The first is the easiest to tackle. Firaxis doesn't want the player to use the ICS method, they have decided that such a tactic is "cheating" and not playing the game the way it was meant to be played. To be specific, they don't want the player winning by creating a large number of very small undeveloped cities. What they want us to do is develop a civilization founded upon large metropolises.

The complaints coming in from people about corruption is that their empires are reaching physical boundaries in the form of distance beyond which they can no longer build large productive cities. Corruption is to some extent stopping the very process it was meant to encourage.

People say that we just need to learn how to play the game. I know how to play the game, I'm not having any trouble winning because of this, I'm just having trouble playing the type of game that I would like to enjoy. I can not effectively create a continent spanning civilization with great cities throughout it. I can not effectively conquer the world unless I just raze every city I take that isn't on my own continent.

Corruption is not something I can learn how to "deal" with because I have been given no effective tools for dealing with it. I can't "learn how to play the game" because corruption is not an aspect of play, it is an incontestable law of nature. I don't consider the process of spending thousands of gold to rush build all the necessary improvements to reduce the city from 99% corruption to 75% to be effective ways of dealing with the problem. (And this only works for some cities, for others even after building courthouses and all happiness improvements, the corruption remains at 99%)

Firaxis says they want me to concentrate on large well developed cities, at least that is what claiming that ICS is cheating seems to imply Give me some city improvements to reduce corruption and I would love to do that. Make them relatively high tech if you wish, so that people trying to do ICS won't benefit from them, that's fine with me. I'm not trying to recreate ICS, I just want to build the same large overdeveloped grandiose cities that I have in the center of my empire.

As for the historical aspect, people claim that large empires never survive for long periods of time. This is true to some extent. However in most regards, no civilization, large empire or not, survives over the time scale we're talking about. The only relatively cohesive culture that has maintained itself throughout history has been China, and even it has fallen to invasion more than once, although culturally it remained a distinct entity.

The British empire founded the American colonies which were quite productive, and were lost to revolution, not corruption. Hong Kong was about as far away from London as you could possibly get, yet was highly productive and only left England's control because the lease expired in 1997. America conquered and held Hawaii, and today it is one of the 50 states, and just as productive as any other.

The more advanced technology has gotten, particularly travel and communications technology, the less of a factor distance has had on civilizations. With airplanes and television and satellites there is no reason why an effective world government could not be formed today, when you can talk with anyone on the planet instantaneously, and go visit anywhere within the period of a few days.

And finally, the light at the end of the tunnel. People bitterly complain about the effects of Democracy on corruption, which while it claims in the Civilopedia that it has "Minimal" corruption, waste continues to be rampant under it. People also point out that Communism is clearly broken since the corruption is not equalized at all.

Perhaps _all_ the governments are broken in respect to corruption, and in fact do nothing. I would actually consider this to be a good thing, since it would mean that Firaxis had not actually intended to saddle us with this issue, and that things should be much better after the first patch when the bug is fixed.