“Being screwed by the geography of the map” I think it is something that can happen in a variety of ways other than the corruption mechanic. For instance, landing on a zone without key strategic resources (like iron), can also lead to a playthrough where you are the underdog. Certainly, widely separate good city sites (hence high corruption) and no strategic resources would make me go for a restart, more often than not. But I do have fond memories of games with Civ 2 and 3 where I was the underdog living out in the wilderness, only to make a come back much later in the game.

NB: As an aside, I don’t consider having to restart my games a major failure in game design, when I am rolling dice to setup the initial conditions.

My problem with corruption has to do with your b).

Corruption is a neat way of accounting for a major characteristic in human political history: the more spread out a civilization/kingdom/nation it is, you need to have good communications, strong military and sound government be to keep it being a cohesive whole.

Hence, far away cities not cooperating 100% with the designs of the God Emperor (the player), feels to me just about right. You can go “wide” as you say, but if you don’t work your arse off to keep the newly created empire united, you will find yourself being pulled back as you won’t be able to make up for the Settler investment and suffer from paying opportunity costs in enacting policies that further your goals (“policies” meaning other game moves, like creating Settlers, military units, wonders or specific buildings).

Where I think Civ corruption failed was in redirecting those resources to /dev/null. That is, indeed, both frustrating and not very thematic.

I would rather see those cities investing that production in stuff the God Emperor/Player doesn’t want, like extra military units, improvements or buildings, or may cause trouble, by say, encroaching on neighbours or stirring up “barbarians”. That would be thematic, and give the impression of the outer edges of your empire enjoying a degree of autonomy which you can try to exploit or fight off.

Note that I am skirting the “tall vs wide” discussion… I understand that some peeps think that small civs need to be a viable option, but the historical record shows that if you want to be top doggo in the long run, you need to be the bigger doggo too (i.e. China). When I see mechanics that promote “tallness” I cringe, as the games veer more into fantasy land, with city states that have more to do with Gondolin or Rivendell than Venice or the Hanseatic League.

Cheers for the discussion, I am enjoying it

As it happens this is basically what Civ 4 did — maintenance costs weren’t necessarily all that sophisticated, but it shifted the burden onto an empire-wide level and allowed your big developed cities to pay for the colonies until they could start generating a return on the investment. There’s room to play with that mechanic; unfortunately Civ 5 ditched it for the far more opaque (and nonsensical) empire happiness system.

(The actual fix is to make both going wide and going tall viable in distinctly different ways — they should be different playstyles, not One Strategy To Rule Them All. Civ 5 tried this and failed miserably, and Civ 6 appears to have given up, but there are other 4Xes such as the Endless series that have played around with the concept of what a city is to enable a bunch of different mechanics, and which I think Civilization could learn from.)

Still, I think the issue with the AI in recent Civs has been more to do with the complexity of the game mechanics than anything else; Civ 4 proves that you can balance transparency with a strong and challenging AI, and exponentially increasing the complexity of the unit behaviour by shifting to one unit per tile proved more than it could handle.

I, for one, don’t understand the hate towards corruption… Firaxis hasn’t been able to come up with an alternative, and posterior games suffered as a result, when they made it less restrictive. Maybe it is jyst that if you don’t want someone to do something – like 50 cities for instance – what actually “works” is to make them feel dumb for doing it?

Anyways, you are also totally right that the first two or three Civ were way more outward looking than the later ones.

Looking forward to future installments.

I first played Civ1 around 1997 or 1998 and it felt great. Being a kid I just wanted to enjoy the march of history with little interest in mechanics but I remember a couple of things that were memorable to me.

Unlike later games it put restrictions on city sizes. No matter what a city bigger than 5 or something people needs aqueduck. And then there was AI that played by its own rules. I wanted to be fair. I guess Firaxis really cares about what 10 year old boys think because they went that way and eventually lost an interesting opponent in AI.