Matrix Games Forums

ORIGINAL: Rustyallan

I finally figured out where to find the corruption value and am somewhat surprised to find it at 51% on my homeworld (top of the map) and up to 71% 3-4 sectors away, and down to 68% at the bottom of the map.  This is all after a major expansion push by me.  I'm still operating on surpluses, but have started to go into the red on cashflow at 163 colonies in a 700 system game.  My net reserves are stable or growing though.  I'll save a game at this point and play a while longer to see how bad I can drive it.    We definitely need to get it renamed though.  My government is Way of the Ancients, my people are happy, but ~70% of my empire is corrupt...  Time to rename my empire to the Centauri Republic, perhaps?

ORIGINAL: taltamir

ORIGINAL: Fishman

ORIGINAL: taltamir

This is totally not what is happening to me. I am literally swimming in cash here.

This holds true for much of the early game. Eventually, however, the non-stop corruption creep starts to overcome your gains, because it always increases, never caps out, and works as a percentile, so the same linear increase creates a rapidly accelerating drain on your income that eventually outstrips your ability to increase it. At this point, your income begins dropping until it goes negative again.

No, I am swimming in cash because my empire is large, the larger I get the richer I get.

ORIGINAL: Fishman

Speaking of which, one more rant worthy of note: In 1.03, empires were mostly inclusive, and this fit well with the behavior of population: Having a population in an empire never hurt you and could eventually benefit you, so there was no particular reason to consider any group undesirable outright.

In 1.04, this is very different: There is now a strong motivation to encourage racial purity and strictly controlled population. With 1.03, having 2 billion of a race in your empire gave you their percentile bonii. In 1.04, this is done by percentage in a "first past the post" system. So in order to unlock a bonus, at some point, a race had to be 50% of your population. Therefore, ANY ADDITIONAL RACES detracts from your ability to achieve this goal, and those other-aliens are actually counterproductive. Making it percentage-based sets a very strict limitation on how many races you can have without it being a drag: 2! It's also not entirely realistic, since you'd think you'd gain, say, the full Research Bonus if you had enough Quamenos to fill out your researcher caste, rather than a need to have half your empire consist of them. Obviously half the population cannot all be researchers! A return to some variation of the older rules would help to eliminate the problem where the automated systems are now acting against the interests of the players. Perhaps make it 10B, rather than 2, but some sort of fixed goalpost would avoid this problem. As it stands, the current rule results in a moving goalpost that your automated systems shoot in the foot.

Yep. I think the best approach would be a gradually increasing racial bonus, starting at 1% and increasing by 1% as a particular race population grows in your empire. Why wasn't this done to start? Is it difficult to implement?

ORIGINAL: jscott991

ORIGINAL: taltamir

ORIGINAL: Fishman

This holds true for much of the early game. Eventually, however, the non-stop corruption creep starts to overcome your gains, because it always increases, never caps out, and works as a percentile, so the same linear increase creates a rapidly accelerating drain on your income that eventually outstrips your ability to increase it. At this point, your income begins dropping until it goes negative again.

No, I am swimming in cash because my empire is large, the larger I get the richer I get.

Yes, large is a relative term. Are you 150+ systems? 200+ systems? Corruption should be eating you up at this point.

Why on Earth is corruption increasing on my capital when I add a colony on the periphery? I thought the whole point of corruption was to diminish returns for new colonies; not reduce the value of the existing empire. And how then does this ridiculous geographic modifier work (distance from capital increasing corruption)?

It's remarkable that this is occurring and all to increase the difficulty for micromanagers. Great job. Great patch.

ORIGINAL: ASHBERY76

Corruption is a way to even the playing field and lessen the unstoppable snowball effect and stop the insane amount of money you get mid to late game when your empire becomes huge.Many games like EU3,TotalWar and even CIV4 use similar methods and most people are happy with it.

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

Please, how many posts on corruption is this? I've already said that this described late game corruption behavior in huge empires (which I still haven't seen a save for) does not sound like the intended result and is probably some kind of bug. Second, we have already said that an economic/corruption slider is planned.

Edit: As an avid EU3 player, it has nothing with this kind of impact in it. DW's main economic value is corruption. The surrogate for it in EU3 is hardly noticeable.