yeah, but you would have to think twice about dropping a level 1 city right next to a single library resource because that would increase corruption to every city you own.  this in turn might make you lose a resource in a different city.  with this system lots of thought has to go into management.

also, this system would allow influence wars with other factions.  you could have spells that cause corruption on a faction city, or reduce it in your own.

also i see that if you have a resource and lose it due to corruption then it will go dormant until you or someone else enclose it in your influence.

City spam is caused by a poor decision on my part to have resources totally dependent on natural resources. Players are practically forced to city spam.

This is something we're addressing in v1.1.

the thing is, in your opinion does the idea your implementing in 1.1 stop city spam or does it just give you other options?  because based on your post it would seem that you can still city spam.  granted i am not totally against city spam, i am just offering a solution if city spam is voted out.

the idea comes from real life really.  its easy to control a small area as long as you can have direct control over it, but the larger your dominion is the harder to keep it in check.  example: if you ruled 10 cities that were large in their own right, it would be hard to watch every area of your domain.  lets say at the edge of your lands you have a city that has 2 gold mines.  since its so far away, it would be hard to keep an eye on it.  because of this you would have a noble that might be corrupted by a wealthy merchant to work together to take one of those mines as their own without you knowing about it.  because so much is coming in you wouldn't realize it.

this is where the improvements come in.  basically you would create a sort of branch of your elite guards that were very loyal to watch over and investigate that sort of thing.  however it would cost guildar to build it and also upkeep(gotta pay em).

to me thats corruption.  it makes it continually harder to keep an eye on an ever increasing empire.  the bigger the city the more people that want to take money under the table in order to look the other way.

I wish frogboy would say as little more about what he means by :  

In theory the idea of corruption is a good one, but in practice, in Civ III it ended up being a nightmare.  It killed the fun, which is the most important part of any game.

I never city spam.

Ex: today i had a huge sphere of influence with my one level five city. My army=my sovriegn. this is around turn 300. later when one of my enemies attacked between my sovriegn and my sole champion we took control of goo 15-30 cities. Of those i took about 3 or 4 and razed the rest because they were completly useless and a drain on my economy.

I personally don't city spam but my enmeies constlantly due which is my biggest irritation in the whole game

I'm wondering what the sense is for denser cities causing more corruption, other than an abstract mechanism to reduce city spam, and there is enough abstract mechanisms already (like caravans producing food).  Refering to post #8, don't cities in real life benefit organization and oversight by bringing law and administrative functions to the outskirts of your domain?  I can maybe see corrupt administrators of these towns pocketing some of the gold and resources produced by the town, and so the player takes a resource hit if they city spam, but an influence penalty makes no sense to me. 

Second, if you are spamming cities at every resource node, how much penalty would limiting influence be?  It would make caravans die more to wandering monsters, but other than that, I'm not sure what other penalties to reduced influence there are that city spam wouldn't solve. 

Finally, the math of corruption involves understanding the math of influence and all gets pretty distant to the player.

[Corruption resembles the inverse of a hinterlands system I proposed in a similar thread, where a city requires a certain number of contiguous free tiles surrounding it (within ones influence and not used by other cities) in order to level up, with the rationale being a city requires the products of its countryside to feed expanding populations.  Whereas corruption reduces influence, hinterlands consumes tiles under your influence, and you can still city spam if you keep most cities at a very low level in order to spare hinterlands tiles to feed your occasional level 5 city.  The penalty if you city spam is limitations on city level, and the math involves simple tile counts.]

May I follow up on a suggestion I made a few weeks ago?

Divide the current "food" resource into "food" and "water."  Now, make the only sources of water to be:  Oasis, and 'herd' squares.  Fertile land, by itself, has no value.  It is ONLY potentially valuable IF you have sufficient water to nourish crops.  Now, by herds, I mean wild horses / wargs /unlikely allies.  The herd would not be there without water.  Insect/spider , etc squares have moisture enough only for the initial unlikely ally settlement that you unlock thru tech. This means NONE of these provide water.  Any troops you train from these sources rely on food and water from your settlements. 

Refugee camps add just enough food and water to support the increased population they grant to the settlement.  (They have hydroponics, or whatever.)  

Water is required to raise food.  Fertile land, wild wheat, etc. are places where one unit of water will grow the most food.  Both food and water are required for every unit of population (Civilian population, workers, miners, scholars, mages, horses, wargs, warriors, and "other" (spider, etc) warriors, every turn.  Eliminate irrigation - or limit it to settlements that actually grow crops.  Currently, any settlement size 2 or above can irrigate, even if it has no planted crops.  If a sov want's to use mounts in a unit, that unit is now "two" for food and water consumption.  Now it will consume resources every turn to grow and keep a herd of horses for mounts.

In extreme cases, a Sov might have the herd butchered to provide food / water.  A system set up like this would reduce city spam significantly, as the only real water sources are oasis.  It just depends on how much water you decide each oasis can "deliver" each turn before being drawn dry.   is this a possibility?