[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Thoughts about corruption

[Kevin Brown <kevin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Gregor Zeitlinger <zeitling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sun, 25 Nov 2001, Reinier Post wrote:
> > > 1) I think it's easier and more predictable to make it a function that
> > > depends on the total number of cities only. 
> > > 
> > > 2) Which city has how much corruption could still depend on the distance
> > > to the capital. Still easier would be to have the same amount of
> > > corruption in each city, as in Communism (civ2 at least). Order of
> > > founding could also be a possibility.
> > 
> > Don't 1 and 2 contradict each other?
> Well, what I meant was that corruption for a city depends on the total
> number of cities or the number of a city (in order: distance to capital or
> history) rather than the acutal distance to a city. In two I was
> describing that order.

But corruption is really just an expression of how much a city will
deviate from the ruler's wishes (and, in the case of production, how
much of the economic value of said production winds up in the hands of
the corrupt local rulers instead of where you, the supreme ruler, wish
it to go).

The distance of the city from the ruling capital is a very rough
approximation of how this effect plays out in real life, but I think
we can do better.  In real life, the thing that would really matter
isn't distance on the map but how easily you can get good intelligence
about the situation in the remote region and how easily you can
project military might over that distance, both of which depend mostly
on the speed of your transportation infrastructure between you and the
remote region.

So it seems to me that the corruption value should be determined by
how long it would take someone to get from your capital to the target
city.  And hence one way to reduce corruption in a remote location
would be to build transporation infrastructure between the capital and
the remote location.

Note that this has certain implications with respect to various modes
of transporation, rail in particular.  It becomes a lot more important
for the movement values of various transporation mechanisms to be
fairly realistic, at least relative to each other.  So walking gets
you a couple of squares per turn, riding a horse gets you twice that,
the rail gets you twice that of horse, and flying gets you perhaps 5
times that of rail.


Thoughts?


-- 
Kevin Brown                                           kevin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

    It's really hard to define what "unexpected behavior" means when you're
                       talking about Windows.