Perhaps corruption should be totally based on amassed culture points rather than distance , or perhaps reduce corruption based on culture.It just seems to intuitively make sense that the long standing historically important cities in your empire should have less corruption. For example if the US conquered Canada, Toronto would have more corruption than Los Angeles even though it is physically closer to Washington D.C. (err.. I think). This would reduce the problem of rampant corruption, but it would still make just as much trouble to the potential world conquerers out there.
Also i think that contiguousness (not being connected by road, or to a much lesser extent, a harbor) should increase corruption over time (distant parts of the empire develop a desire for independance).
It think this would create a really cool dynamic if corruption were based only on culture because you would always have to try to keep up the culture ahead of corruption and avoiding overthrow
If you brought in the idea of luxury expenditures increasing culture, then alot of things make sense. A wealthy empire can keep its colonies together, but if expenditures on luxury start to slip (increased military spending, end of golden age, etc.) it gets harder to keep things together.
Wow. Maybe im just patting myself on the back but the more i think about this the better it sounds. This would require only a few changes. 1) Keep a counter of "corruption points" incremented each turn related to the connected-ness and distance from capital. 2) Corruption this turn is based on the difference between "corruption points" and culture points" 3) Luxury expenditures increase culture (x number of gold/culture point where x is some play-test
determined number.
