Editor’s Note: The following article describes tactics that are regarded as an exploit in GOTM/RBCiv. The article has been retained in the War Academy because the tactics are valid, and serve to further an understanding of the game, but using these tactics is not allowed in certain games played in the Civ community.
I think I just discovered the reason for all the corruption discrepancies and phenomenon that troubled me for a long time. Things like why did I often observed corruption reduction in my old core when I just made a palace jump and also the recent lower corruption I see in my distance 7 ring around the FP in GOTM22 which later increases for no apparent reason.
And it looks like this can be huge exploit, which can reduce corruption tremendously. With this exploit, it is possible to make most, if not all, of my cities rank 1! This effectively negates almost all corruption due to rank.
Before you read this, you should get yourself familiar with Alex’s “Do you understand corruption”? At the minimum, you should understand the difference between corruption due to rank and corruption due to distance.
The discovery is actually very simple. The city rank as we all know really has ONLY one set, not two sets! All rank calculation in Civ3 depends on the number of cities with distance less than Fd from the palace only, regardless of whether the city is nearer to the FP or the Palace. Note that the gist of the above statement is that rank depends on the number of cities with distance less than Fd, and not the number of cities nearer to the palace for the city concern, nor the number of cities nearer to the FP.
Mathematically, the formula should be:
(For the full corruption formula, please refer to Alex’s thread – Do you understand corruption?)
Distance of a city (Fd) = min(distance from Palace, distance from FP)
Rank of a city (Fn) = 1 + Number of cities with distance FROM PALACE less than Fd (i.e. ignore the source of Fd, just count the number of cities with distance less than Fd from the palace, even if the city is nearer to the FP)
If the above does not sound like something new, then you might not have understand it correctly. Here is an example to illustrate what the above really means.
Let say you have cities with these distances from the palace and FP respectively
Palace – 4, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7, 7, 11, 11, 11, 11, 12 etc
FP – 3, 3, 5, 5, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 9, 9, 10, 10 etc
Let say, I am trying to determine the corruption of the distance 8 cities from the FP. Previously, I had always thought that the rank of the distance 8 cities would be 5. But my discovery says it is NOT.
The rank of the distance 8 city would actually be 9! This is because there are eight cities with distance less than 8 from the capital. They are 4, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7, 7. The number of cities nearer to the FP does not matter.
Similarly, the rank of the distance 10 cites from the FP is not 12. It will be considered as rank 9 again since the same cites – 4, 4, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7, 7 – would be closer to the palace.
I am not sure if this example is good enough. If this is not clear enough, I would suggest trying the exploit below and you should be able to understand what the above means.
The Exploit
To exploit the above, basically, all you need to do is to put your palace as far away as possible without any of your own cities near it. This way, all your cities near the FP will be considered as Rank 1! Try this on a recent game you finish by abandoning all the cities near the palace and see how your corruptions near the FP reduces like magic(You may need to remove and put back the population to see the changes). So if the nearest city to the capital is distance 20. Then all cities less than 20 distance from the FP is considered to have a rank of 1. Imaging that!! Even those cities that are considerable distance from the FP now become very useful. I tested it on a recently finish game and I see my previously fully corrupted cities in the outer ring of my FP turning into low corruption power cities.
I have attached an example of this. You can check the city New Argos which is at a distance of 12 from the FP and with a rank in excess of 20 if I calculate it the old way. You can check with Alex’s calculator that the corruption level is of a city with distance 12 and rank 1. Note that this sav is mod but none of the mod affects corruption, just to facilitate testing.
RCP impact – The above basically means you just need to do RCP on the palace. Cities around the FP gains the benefit automatically, provided the city distance is not more than the rings at the palace. RCP around the FP does not help at all.
Additional Comment 1 – Even a simpler approach of ICS near FP and sparse city placement at palace will help greatly in this battle against corruption since the sparse placement near the palace will help the city corruption near FP.
Additional Comment 2 – The above also resolved the question about how is the corruption calculated when it’s rank is nearer to Palace and distance is nearer to FP or the opposite.
Additional Comment 3 – This exploit would make commercial trait useless since this effectively negates almost all corruption due to rank.
I guess GOTM should ban the above exploit this since this will be overpowering. I don’t think there is any reasonable way you can ban the method in additional comment 1 though since it starts to gets into the gray area.
Tests are made on Vanilla Civ3 1.29. I suspect it should be the same for PTW. Credit must be made to Alex for having discover and fine-tune the corruption formula which serves as the basis for me to investigate this. Also, Daviddesj’s RCP is what really re-kindle my interest to make this investigation.
(All information contain herein are the result of extensive testing made by the author. Although, diligent effort has been made to ensure that the results are true, there is always a possibility that insufficient test has been made. Everyone is welcome to either confirm or show results which contradicts the information shown here)
Attachment: rank_corruption_example.sav