[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Thoughts about corruption

[Kevin Brown <kevin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mike Jing <miky40@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I think it's a great idea.  I like the idea of transportation infrastructure 
> helps to reduce corruption.  But I also want to point out there should be a 
> minimum amount of corruption that can't be reduced any further no matter how 
> fast you can get from here to there, so that even teleport won't magically 
> reduce any corruption to zero.  

Sure, but teleportation should bring corruption down to a constant
value that is independent of the distance between the capital city and
the target city, because with teleportation both cities are now
essentially part of the same city (cheap teleportation would have all
sorts of interesting social consequences that I won't get into here).

> It is also realistic that you can't 
> eliminate corruption altogether, so there will be corruption even in your 
> capital, although most likely it will be very small.

Right.  But I think the purpose of implementing corruption in the Civ
series is to model the historical effects of distance and time from
the ruler's location to the outer reaches of the civilization in
question, so the fact that there would be corruption even in the
capital isn't terribly interesting for this purpose.

There are other effects that distance (in travel time) would have on a
civilization: the more distant a city from the ruling source, the more
likely that city would succeed in breaking away from the ruling
civilization in the event of an uprising.  What this means in game
terms is that it should be more important to keep your citizens
content in distance cities than in ones that are closer to the
capital.  I think this should be modeled in Freeciv if it isn't
already: when the population gets unhappy and they attempt revolt,
there should be some probability per turn that the city will "succeed"
in this and become independent (with the result that any military
units stationed in the city also go rogue and support the city in its
independence).  When that happens, you should have to reconquer it
with your military, which might not be easy if you had a strong
military presence there already.  Furthermore, moving military units
into a city should be one way to reduce the chance of a revolt's
success, but doing so should make more citizens unhappy.  Right now
having a military presence increases the overall happiness of the
population, which seems counterintuitive.

It doesn't make sense to me to have the city automatically revolt just
because a certain percentage of the population is unhappy.  The
happiness/unhappiness of the population as a whole should affect (but
not be the only factor in) the probability that the city will revolt
during the turn.  A city that is composed mostly of happy citizens is
very unlikely to revolt, but it shouldn't be entirely impossible.

>   As for railroads, we 
> can just assign it a reasonable number for this purpose.

I think it makes more sense to actually limit the movement distance
per turn that is possible on the railroads.  Right now the railroads
are "infinitely" fast but in reality they are perhaps twice to four
times as fast as travel on horseback.

Then again, time in the game is measured in years to decades, so in
reality you should be able to go an "infinite" amount of distance on
both horseback and on a train, and somewhat less (but much more than
one square!) on foot.


It would be interesting to see how well the game would play with
"realistic" movement and corruption.


-- 
Kevin Brown                                           kevin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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