City names

Since I always mod my game to be overflowing with barbarians and barbarian cities, there are usually quite a few barbarian civs that end up having 3 or 4 "barbarian" city names. Since barbarian city names are taken from tribes rather than from cities (Hittite rather than Hattusha) it tends to look a little funky, especially since you'll have, in the modern era, cities with several tribe names, and then the standard Washington, Boston, etc all a part of the same civ.

So I was thinking of a mechanism to allow cities to be renamed to one of the cities in the owner's city list. At first I just figured that after a certain period of time, a barbarian city that a player owned should just get renamed after a period of time, so that eventually the American city of Hun would eventually get renamed New Orleans, or something.

But then I realized there's a potential for a pretty cool game mechanic. Say that a civilization's citizens are happier (or, for the purposes of civ, less unhappy) when their city has an ethnic name. My idea is that, after a certain period of time and after a certain amount of culture has accumulated (and perhaps even after some buildings such as a courthouse have been built), any conquered city (whether from barbs or another civ) can be renamed to one of the conqueror's city names, and reduce some of the unhappiness from "we yearn to join our motherland." The idea being, that renaming the city sort of sets in stone the fact that it is now a part of the owner's empire and therefore reduces the population's want to rebel, since it has been more or less officially inducted into the conquering civ's empire.

So, in other words, rather than just typing in a textfield the new city's name, there's an actual game mechanic that you would use to sort of cement your grip on the population.

This could lead to things like in real life, where Constantinople becomes Istanbul, etc. Also, it would eliminate those civs that end up with "Hun" as their capital in 2000 AD, since they would have since renamed the city to another ethnic one. It's also a distinct way to see how a civ spreads its culture, since conquered cities with a significant amount of its culture will have been renamed.

Some other related and potentially fun ideas:

-Somewhere it keeps track of the renamed city's old name(s), so by looking at the city info screen of something, you'd see Hun-->Boston-->present day Neapolis.

-Dynamic city names. We have dynamic civ names already, so why not? I don't know exactly how far this could go or how useful it would be, but it would be cool if there was something along the lines of: city of Hittite turns into a civ, becomes the capital, renamed to Washington, then gets conquered and renamed Ninevah, then has a revolution/gets reconquered and becomes Old Washington.

Anyway, as far as this renaming mechanism taking place, here's my ideas for the requirements:

-City must have been captured a certain number of turns, regardless of whether or not there is dissent among the citizens.
-City must have built a courthouse
-City must have more than 35% of conqueror's culture (50% after Nationalism)

If the above conditions are met, then the following effects happen

-Less unhappiness from "we yearn to join our motherland"
-Less negatives to the rev index from nationality
-Small, temporary boost to culture (+100, maybe)
-Some reduction in the rev index

For people who want to manually name their cities, all they have to do is use the rename mechanic, and then just change the name manually in the textfield.

I apologize for the long post. Thoughts?

This is a really neat idea. I think switching to or from State Property (and maybe other civics too?) could also be a trigger for renaming cities, for example St. Petersburg -> Leningrad -> back to St. Petersburg.

I like this renaming idea, but I don't know if I like the idea of having a city hit a certain threshold and then having resistance drop off. I think culture and nationality have worked well, because over time they slowly take over the area and degrade resistance to nil. Even if this represents an area being solidified as part of an empire like you said, this doesn't mean that resistance drops off. For instance, the Russo-Turkish War between the Russians and the Ottomans was sparked by Slavic nationalism (which the Russians believed they shared) in the Balkans (part of the Ottoman empire at that time), which the Ottomans had held for years.

StormLord-711- said:

I like this renaming idea, but I don't know if I like the idea of having a city hit a certain threshold and then having resistance drop off. I think culture and nationality have worked well, because over time they slowly take over the area and degrade resistance to nil. Even if this represents an area being solidified as part of an empire like you said, this doesn't mean that resistance drops off. For instance, the Russo-Turkish War between the Russians and the Ottomans was sparked by Slavic nationalism (which the Russians believed they shared) in the Balkans (part of the Ottoman empire at that time), which the Ottomans had held for years.

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The resistance wouldn't necessarily drop off. I'm just approaching this from the point view of having a slight stabilizing mechanic in the game to "assimilate" cities into your empire. By no means should this cut resistance out entirely, just a bit (and perhaps, if a revolution does occur, it would be a bit more violent). As it is, it's hard enough to capture and hold a single decent cultured enemy city past the medieval age.

Nice idea, I like it!

Definitely renaming barbciv cities to civ appropriate names makes good sense, I'll definitely add that.

Renaming cities for rebels who manage to establish themselves also seems to make sense, giving them a chance to symbolically shake the shackles of their former masters.

Your ideas for triggers for renaming captured cities are good too.

Renaming cities shouldn't be very hard since there's already a mechanism for it, it will require some checking to see if a name has already been used but other than that should be straight forward. Keeping track of past names for a city and potentially reverting to them I'm not so sure about ... there are some checks already in the game for names that have already been used, but I'm not sure how easy it would be to update this to also not assign the alternate names for a city. It would be a cool feature, we'll just have to see what can be done.

I know that Rhye's mod has a feature like this, where if a civ captures certain cities that they did in history they will change names automatically (like from Constantinople to Istanbul, etc.). Hopefully though, you could make it so that if you lost a city and had it renamed, the computer wouldn't want to call your next city you built by that same name (especially if you wanted to recapture your old city and give it its original name back).

StormLord-711- said:

Hopefully though, you could make it so that if you lost a city and had it renamed, the computer wouldn't want to call your next city you built by that same name (especially if you wanted to recapture your old city and give it its original name back).

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That's true, I didn't think about that, but even if jdog can't do anything about it it's not such a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Of course, you could always give a custom name for the newly founded city, and then once you recapture the conquered city you could manually rename it using the textfield rather than the gameplay mechanic, if you follow me.