[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Thoughts about corruption

[Andrew Sutton <ansutton@xxxxxxx>]

On Monday 26 November 2001 07:15 pm, Kevin Brown wrote:
> 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.

actually the manual for civ3 has the best explanation or reasoning that i've 
seen for the corruption concept yet. corruption is just a name for some force 
that runs counterproductively against the progression of your society. in 
short - you're cities are trying to do something (increase production, create 
science) and something is working against that. the higher the force the less 
productive that city is and the less gets done.

corruption isn't neccessarily the right word, although for the sake of 
simplicity it seems to encapsulate do an okay job representing dissent in the 
governmental offices of the city - which certainly can cause 
counterproduction. take the reconstruction after the civil war (us) - lots of 
corruption, very little production.

it takes into account other factors too: popular dissent (can't do much if 
you're citizens don't want to do anything), counterculture rebellion (how 
much did hippies contribute to the GNP?), etc.

measuring corruption as a function of distance only makes sense before the 
telegraph, modern travel, and the media. the factors in the formula for 
distance based corruption will drop to 0 for any society possessing a high 
speed, global communication infrastructure, some kind of national 
transportation facilty and a free press. this is because it's now easier for 
citizens and higher level government organizations to recognize and curtail 
the corruption that occured in, say distant provinces of ancient rome, and 
the wild west.

notice that this doesn't eliminate corruption. just the term in the equation 
that computes corruption as a function of distance.

andy