City Names mod for BTS

Hi everyone. A while ago I was working on a City Names mod for Vanilla Civ4, then Sevomod and Warlords. The basic goal of the mod was to create a game where the potential exists for every major city in world history to appear. To a lesser extend, to have the most important cities appear before less important cities.

Several design decisions in the original city names list in the original made this difficult. First, some civs, like Russia and England, had name lists that consistent only of cities within their "official" borders, and not their local conquests. So Glasgow and Kiev simply did not appear within the game.

Second, the Barbarian "city" list isn't cities at all, but tribes. So cities that existed between civs, such as Polish or Vietnamese cities, aren't included in the game.

There are also several cities that kind of got passed back and forth between empires, especially in the Middle East, such as Jerusalem or Antioch. Happily, the way that city naming works in Civ4 is that if a city exists with a name elsewhere, a second city won't appear with that name. So if the Arabs found Cordoba, the Spanish won't.

Finally, colonies don't exist, by and large, in the vanilla city names list. The Portuguese have a few, but nobody else seems to. So I've added Montreal to the French, Simla to the English, etc.

I'm labeling the initial version 0.5. It's got most of my Warlords work.

Now on version 0.8!

CHANGELOG:



TODO List:

1. Do the rest of the BTS civs.
2. Update the list for consistency.
3. Attempt to convert the python script from RAND for city naming purposes.

Want TODO list:

1. See if it's possible to tie city names to leaders instead of civs. That is, if Stalin is the Russian leader, then the city names are Soviet. If Washington is American, then it's the historical names.

2. Figure out if it's possible to do weighted random city name generation. That is, the third American city may be Boston, SF, LA, or Philly, but you don't know which.



INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS

To install, copy the attached Civ4CivilizationInfos file into the Assets\XML\Civilizations directory.

Be sure to back up your original.

This should also work with mods that use the original civilizations, but I can't guarantee that it won't mess up non-city related XML.

This message is for discussing the details of changes to each civ, and potentially, sparking some fun debates and getting me some help.


AMERICA

Changes: Major
Completed? Mostly

The biggest change I've made to the Americans is changing the capital from Washington to New York. I think that NYC is the cultural and economic capital of the country, and as home of the UN, also a major diplomatic capital. DC is where the paperwork gets done - if anything, it's the home of the Forbidden Palace.

But not everyone agrees with me on this one. It's easy to change if you don't like it, or I'll change it if there's massive public outcry.



ARABIA

Changes Major
Completed? Yes

I've altered the list of cities so that it includes the biggest cities of the various Caliphates. After Mecca and Medina come Damascus, Baghdad, Cordoba, Cairo, Jerusalem, etc. I'm quite happy with the way the Arabian cities act in the game.



AZTECS

Changes Moderate
Completed? Probably

The biggest change to the Aztec city list is that I took Teotihuacan, the Olmec capital, off the second-place Aztec list and moved it to the Barbarian list. I am not an Aztec geography expert, so unless somebody is, this list is likely to remain as-is.



BABYLON

Changes: Major
Completed? Yes

Babylon was somewhat difficult, as other than its namesake city, there aren't a whole lot of cities directly connected to it that aren't connected with other empires, mainly Sumeria. And since Sumeria is already playable, there's significant overlap. However, thanks to the duplicate city name trick, that's no problem.

The bigger problem is that many of the most famous cities of the area weren't Babylon so much as their rivals, mainly the Assyrians, Akkadians, Hittites, etc. I've added the Assyrian and Akkadian cities to the Babylonian list, or rather, kept them on there, as Civ4 had them initially. Since the list was so Akkadian-dominated, I'd almost suggest to Firaxis that next time they include Sargon and Akkad as their own civ.



BYZANTINES

Changes: Moderate
Completed? Mostly

The Byzantines are difficult, as they don't really have any cities of their own which aren't also Greek, Roman, Turkish, or Persian. The main problem was avoiding accidental duplicates with the same Turkish cities having different names. In such cases, I generally went with the civilization that it seemed more important to, unless the names were similar enough that I could put it in both, such as Thessaloniki.

<City>Constantinople</City>
<City>Thessaloniki</City>
<City>Nicaea</City>
<City>Antioch</City>
<City>Nicomedia</City>
<City>Dyrrachium</City>
<City>Ankara</City>
<City>Trebizond</City>
<City>Amorium</City>
<City>Philippolis</City>
<City>Belgrade</City>
<City>Edirne</City>
<City>Laodicea</City>
<City>Mystras</City>
<City>Dorylaeum</City>
<City>Edessa</City>
<City>Ioannina</City>
<City>Selymbria</City>
<City>Bari</City>

Click to expand...

CARTHAGE

Changes Moderate
Completed? Probably

I have some problems with Carthage's city list, largely because other than the capital, not many of the cities are really historically important. Part of me is leaning towards making Carthage act as a Phoenician civilization, and including Tyre, Byblos, etc. There's also the Gades/Cadiz issue. Many of the cities in the area were more important due to their relationship with Rome more than Carthage. I also re-added Sicilian cities, which had been removed. Carthago Nova is also problematic, as it was an important Carthaginian city, but a player with a lot of cities could end up with New Carthage or even New Carthago Nova.



CELTS

Changes: High
Completed? Yes

Hey, it turns out that Vienne isn't Vienna after all, but was actually a Gaulish city. Who knew? The Celts have similar problems to the Carthaginians, in that their cities were better-known for what the Romans did to them after them after they were conquered. So I researched various Celtic/Gaulish/Celtiberian/Briton tribes and cities, and came up with this.

<City>Bibracte</City>
<City>Gergovia</City>
<City>Noreia</City>
<City>Camulodunum</City>
<City>Bononia</City>
<City>Vienne</City>
<City>Tervanna</City>
<City>Alesia</City>
<City>Verlamion</City>
<City>Aduatuca</City>
<City>Samarobriva</City>
<City>Nemetocenna</City>
<City>Mediolanum</City>
<City>Bratuspantium</City>
<City>Vellaunodunum</City>
<City>Brixia</City>
<City>Numantia</City>
<City>Crociatonum</City>
<City>Cremona</City>

Click to expand...

CHINA

Changes Moderate
Completed? Yes

The Chinese are difficult because they have had so many different cities of importance in different times. Beijing became an important city around 12-1300 CE. Is it more important than Chang'an? Nanjing? Which capital is most capitalitastic? Too much history! I played it mostly by ear. Feel free to convince me otherwise.

In 0.7, I added more historical capitals, or moved them up the city list.




EGYPT

Changes: Moderate
Completed? Depends

I'm not an Egyptologist, so a few years ago when I started this project, I gave the list to a friend who was, and let her punch it up. So I'm tempted to say that it's pretty much done, except for my concurrent looking at RFC/RAND's city names, which uses the actual Egyptian names for cities, instead of the Greek versions.



ENGLAND

Changes: Moderate
Completed? No

I did some shuffling with the English, particularly the Hastings problem. The English have a similar problem to the Chinese, in that the historically important cities, like York or Canterbury, and unimportant now compared to the sudden industrial powers, like Manchester or Liverpool. This is a situation best resolved by having Elizabethan city names compared to Victorian. For now, it's a compromise list. I've also added several colonies.

What I haven't done is added Scot, Welsh, or Irish city names to this list, which I should do in order to be consistent with the Russian list.



ETHIOPIA

Changes: Moderate
Completed? Probably not

My Ethiopian list came from my alterations to Sevomod. I haven't really checked it out against the Firaxis list.





FRANCE

Changes: Significant
Completed? Mostly

The original Firaxis list of French cities was rather short and didn't include colonies. They doubled the length of the list with BTS, but also got a little bit sloppy. For example, they had both Reims and Rheims. I've altered the order a little bit, and added several colonies. The main thing I need to do is add some Belgian names, in order to be consistent with what I did with the Dutch.




GERMANY

Changes: Minor
Completed? Yes

While it is somewhat annoying to have the Holy Roman Empire in addition to Germany, it actually proves somewhat helpful to have the HRE in order to fix the problem of cities that were important medievally, but unimportant in the modern age. Now, the medieval cities are high on the HRE list, and the modern ones are high here.

I've also added a few Austrian cities.



GREECE

Changes: Significant
Completed? Mostly

One of my motivations for changing these lists was Thermopylae being founded before Argos, etc, on the Greek list. Firaxis got a clue and changed the Greek list pretty significantly for BTS, and good for them. My list and their list are now fairly close, at least for the mainland Greek cities. After that, it gets a bit more complicated, largely due to the Greek colonies, conquests, and the Byzantine cities. I've also just noticed that I added Troy to the Barbarian list, but still have Ilion on the Greek list.



HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE

Changes: Moderate
Completed? Yes

As I said in Germany, I used the HRE/Germany distinction to put the important medieval cities here. The other major change I made was moving some of the important Italian cities to the Barbarian list, like Venice or Genoa. Pisa and Siena remained with the HRE, as they were Ghibelline cities.

Yes, I made that distinction. It works!




INCA

Changes: Minor
Completed? Probably

The Incans mostly just took a few hours looking up cities and changing the order somewhat.



INDIA

Changes: Minor
Completed? By me, yes

I don't know a whole lot about Indian history, so I sorted this one by the way cities sounded important to me. Those tended to be the modern cities of import.




JAPAN

Change: Minor
Completed? Yes

Very small changes here, mostly shifting Tokyo to the capital. I don't know enough about Japanese history to really fault the Firaxis list.



KHMER

Unfinished

I know very little about the Khmer civilization, and need to do some research in order to make changes.

KOREA

Changes: Minor
Completed? I think so

I don't know a whole lot about Korea, and the Firaxis list seems pretty good. I did move the old capital of Kaesong up a bit.



MALI

Changes: Moderate
Completed? Yes

I did these changes with the original version of this mod. Unless something seems obviously wrong, they're probably staying the way they are.





MAYA

Unfinished

Will require research, though I did notice that someone over in Rhye's forum had some significant suggestions, which may help me.


MONGOL

Changes: Moderate
Completed? Probably

The Mongols may be the most difficult civilization to do this for, as the cities they're famous for being involved with are the ones they burnt to the ground. I spent a lot of time researching them last time around, and came up with this list.

I did notice that I didn't include Shangdu/Xanadu the first time around.





NATIVE AMERICANS

Unfinished

Ugh. Same difficulty as the Celts, only worse. Thousands of tribes, how many settlements? The leader of the civilization led a nomadic tribe, who had one temporary settlement, Little Bighorn, which became a rather famous battle and isn't on the list anywhere. This is a headache.

NETHERLANDS

Changes: Moderate
Completed? Yes

Added colonies like Jakarta and Curacao, sorted and cleaned up the list somewhat, and added a few Flemish Belgian cities, like Brugge, Brussels, and Ghent.




OTTOMANS

Changes: Moderate
Completed? Partially

If the civilization is the Ottomans, why is the capital Istanbul not Constantinople? Go on, start singing. I made that change, and sorted the cities.

Note that this will make the Turks and the Byzantines start with the same capital. Theoretically, one of the two should randomly get the name, and the other should have Ankara or Thessalonica as their capital, which I think is entirely fair.

While doing some research into Eastern European cities, I noticed that several, like Belgrade or Sarajevo, had pretty significant Ottoman history. So they're being added, and I'm going to try to add more non-Turkey cities.



PERSIA

Changes: Significant
Completed? Probably

Persia is fairly difficult, given that the geographical region has included several dozen empires, and Civilization focuses entirely on the Achaemenids. So where is Tehran? Well, it's here now. Ideally, I'd like to see different Persian leaderheads for Sassanids and modern leaders, and different cities attached to each. But that's not happening anytime soon. I'm not really sure what to use as the capital, as Susa, Persepolis, and Pasargadae were each Achaemenid capitals, Ctesiphon was the Sassanid capital, and Tehran is the modern capital.




PORTUGAL

Changes: Moderate
Completed? Yes

As I recall, I had help from a Portuguese expert in resorting their cities. The main thing is that several colonies are likely to be founded early on.





ROME

Changes: Significant
Completed? Maybe

Rome is odd, and perhaps more difficult to do this for than you'd think at first glance. First, their empire was almost entirely based around Rome, especially once you subtract the Byzantines. Second, the cities in their geographical region have taken on, and lost, importance over the millennia they've been around. I tried to compromise with that as best as I could, which results in the following list, which I think is an improvement over the original.

As of 0.8, I added more imperial possessions in addition to the primarily Italian cities. Rome now has the longest city list.



RUSSIA

Changes: Significant
Completed? Yes

I'm as happy with Russia as much as I am with any list short of Arabia. The main thing was adding the imperial additions of the Tsars and Soviets, such as Kyiv, Tbilisi, Baku, etc. RFC/RAND include code that changes the city names to the Soviet names if the Russians are using State Property.




SPAIN

Changes: Moderate
Completed? Yes

Spain just took some reshuffling of city names, and the addition of colonies.



SUMERIA

Changes: Minor
Completed? Yes

I did Sumeria in conjunction with Babylon. Since the Sumerian "empire" is more a collection of city-states, known already by their contemporary rankings of such, this one was pretty much already done in cuneiform. Whee!



VIKINGS

Changes: Significant
Completed? Yes

I found the Vikings somewhat problematic, like the Chinese, in that the modern cities may not be the historical ones. In this case, I leaned towards making the Vikings more of a Scandanavia, with the intent of having the major Norse cities, like Oslo, Trondheim, and Stockholm show up. There are also a few colonies.



ZULU

Unfinished

I find the Zulu problematic in a way similar to the Native Americans, though not as difficult to deal with.


BARBARIANS

Changes: Massive
Completed? Not yet

I treated the Barbarians as the independent cities which aren't in the game. Here's where Edinburgh, Teotihuacan, Hanoi, Bangkok, Luxembourg, Florence, Sofia, Khartoum, Knossos, Nairobi, and more are hanging out. My list was put together under different circumstances, and actually, a better list than in this update can be found here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=309699

With the addition of the new civs from BTS, changes to this list have been made.

Neat. Another idea is to simply list the cities in the order that the civ actually founded or acquired or might have founded or acquired the city, historically. As you say, you can duplicate cities on the lists, and if somebody else has founded a city somebody else won't. Wouldn't help with the barbarians. What do you have Edinburgh showing up as a barb city next to Japan? Can't say its any worse than the current tribes. Maybe barb cities should have no names and have to be manually named when captured. It would be kind of cool if city names could also be set to update with change of ownership, era, or civic. St Petersburg becoming Leningrad or Byzantium becoming Constantinople becoming Istanbul. Or Tenochtitlan becoming Mexico City.

Actually, RFC/RAND have code that switches the names already. Here's the State Property turning Russian names Soviet.

def sovietNames(self):
russianCityList = PyPlayer(iRussia).getCityList()
for pCity in russianCityList:
city = pCity.GetCy()
if (city.getName() == 'Caricyn'):
city.setName('Stalingrad', False)
elif (city.getName() == 'Sankt-Peterburg'):
city.setName('Leningrad', False)
elif (city.getName() == 'Tver'):
city.setName('Kalinin', False)
elif (city.getName() == 'Ekaterinburg'):
city.setName('Sverdlovsk', False)
elif (city.getName() == 'Nizhnij Novgorod'):
city.setName('Gorki', False)
elif (city.getName() == 'Samara'):
city.setName('Kujbyshev', False)

I don't really know the Python well enough to see how it interacts with the XML. Maybe this totally supersedes anything in the XML. So I'm not willing to do this just yet. But I know that it's doable.


If Edinburgh shows up next to Japan, then so be it. England and Zulu may set up next to it anyway, so Civilization ending with Japan owning Manchester or Bulawayo happens already.

Interesting with the Barb city names not existing, or rather, changing upon capture. Manual changing won't work, as the AI can't be manual.

Cool. This might work well with a dynamic name creation module as well. Each civ could have a string of appropriate base words and modifier words, in it's own language. E.g. http://www.seventhsanctum.com/generate.php?Genname=greeknamer

Bump for update to 0.6

0.6

Made changes/tweaks to Japanese city names.
Significantly altered Babylon and Sumerian city names.
Minor changes to barbarian city names.
Deleted a few duplicates



GoodGame, there used to be a mod that did that for all the original Civ4 civs. It was rather popular. Not sure if it's still around.

I like the idea for the Barbarian Cities. When I conquor a Barbarian City, I generally change it to an unused city anyway.

On the Dutch list you added Bruges. That's actually the French name. You might want to check up on that as the Flemish equivalent is something like Zeebruge. Other than that I think you've done an outstanding job so far.

Thanks, Edgecrusher. That's one way to do it, but it doesn't work for the AI. "Anasazi" is not a city!

Nutnut, in general, I've chosen to use the commonly accepted American versions of the spelling. Not out of any great patriotic fervor, but because they're the easiest to access for me, and because that makes it easier to avoid the duplicate cities due to different names.

Though in that case, I've switched it to Brugge, which is as recognizable, I think.

Updated to version 0.7

0.7

Worked primarily on German/Austrian/Holy Roman cities, which had a bit of spillover to French, Ottoman, Russian, Byzantine, and Barbarian city names.
Added more historically important Chinese cities.
Tiny alterations to Korean, Dutch and Mongol cities.



Next, I'm probably going to do the Byzantine list. Look for it in the next day or three.

Arkaeyn said:

Nutnut, in general, I've chosen to use the commonly accepted American versions of the spelling. Not out of any great patriotic fervor, but because they're the easiest to access for me, and because that makes it easier to avoid the duplicate cities due to different names.

Though in that case, I've switched it to Brugge, which is as recognizable, I think.

Click to expand...

Fair enough. I'd be hypocritical if I said otherwise. I myself am constructing a scenario that tries to encompass a lot of European history in one go and the Times Atlas of World History tends to (but not always) use English spellings. But wherever possible I do use local names.

Have you looked at Rhye's and Fall, and its city names list? It's in the Python, but it's got a lot of different city names in their original language, as well as the city's name in other languages. Massive amount of work, but much of it's been done.

I've noticed that in Revolution mod, if a civilization rises by "uniting" barbarian cities, my Barbie names get replaced with that civ's capital. Not a big deal, but notable anyway.

Arkaeyn said:

The biggest change I've made to the Americans is changing the capital from Washington to New York. I think that NYC is the cultural and economic capital of the country, and as home of the UN, also a major diplomatic capital. DC is where the paperwork gets done - if anything, it's the home of the Forbidden Palace.

But not everyone agrees with me on this one. It's easy to change if you don't like it, or I'll change it if there's massive public outcry.

Click to expand...

I feel I should say that that is not what Capital means in the context of the game. It's not some kind of vague, most important city or whatever. In game terms, New York may be a very productive city (It has Wall Street, and all number of other wonders such as the UN as you mentioned) but that doesn't mean it's the capital. The capital is where the Palace is, which in the United States means the White House and possibly the Capitol Building. In any case, being a major economic center doesn't make anything the capital of anywhere.

Dryhad said:

I feel I should say that that is not what Capital means in the context of the game. It's not some kind of vague, most important city or whatever. In game terms, New York may be a very productive city (It has Wall Street, and all number of other wonders such as the UN as you mentioned) but that doesn't mean it's the capital. The capital is where the Palace is, which in the United States means the White House and possibly the Capitol Building. In any case, being a major economic center doesn't make anything the capital of anywhere.

Click to expand...

I do agree. Before the reunion of germany, western germanys capital was the City Bonn. Bonn is a quite small and not very known city, but for political reasons the goverment was placed there and not in a bigger, more important or more popular city like Hamburg, Munich or Cologne (which is less than 50 km away from Bonn). The capital of a country is chosen but political, historical or even geographical reasons, not because of economical reasons.

Dryhad said:

I feel I should say that that is not what Capital means in the context of the game. It's not some kind of vague, most important city or whatever. In game terms, New York may be a very productive city (It has Wall Street, and all number of other wonders such as the UN as you mentioned) but that doesn't mean it's the capital. The capital is where the Palace is, which in the United States means the White House and possibly the Capitol Building. In any case, being a major economic center doesn't make anything the capital of anywhere.

Click to expand...

I think it's a bit more grey than tha. You could make the argument that it's the Palace city, but for the majority of civilizations, the capital also functions and has functioned as the most important city. London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Constantinople, Rome, Athens (kind of), Tenochtitlan, Madrid, Beijing, Babylon, Cuzco, etc.

With the Americans, historically, what you have is a situation where a capital was built specifically to be a capital, and located where it helps the maintenance of an already existing country. Most major eastern cities had been built well before Washington D.C.. D.C. was built, and then built the palace (or Versailles, or the Forbidden Palace) as a more efficient central location, i.e., reducing maintenance.


Probably the closest parallel with other Civs would be the Turks and Ankara. Constantinople was their capital for centuries, and their financial and cultural center as well. Events after WWI led to the new Turkish government not having access to Istanbul when they formed their new government, so Ankara became the capital. But historically, Constantinople/Istanbul was far more important.



All that said, this is why I personally prefer D.C. to be lower on the list. If the rest of the world disagrees, I can change it back. But normally it seems 50/50 for people who care.

I think that since D.C. was not established until later and was not important before then, it should be lower on the list. George Washington was first inagurated in New York at Federal Hall and the Bill of Rights was passed there, so NYC is an appropriate capital.

Arkaeyn said:

I think it's a bit more grey than tha. You could make the argument that it's the Palace city, but for the majority of civilizations, the capital also functions and has functioned as the most important city. London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Constantinople, Rome, Athens (kind of), Tenochtitlan, Madrid, Beijing, Babylon, Cuzco, etc.

Click to expand...

All of those were also the palace city. The fact that they were also the most important cities of their respective nations is immaterial. It certainly doesn't mean you should just shoehorn the American civilisation into this situation.

Arkaeyn said:

With the Americans, historically, what you have is a situation where a capital was built specifically to be a capital, and located where it helps the maintenance of an already existing country. Most major eastern cities had been built well before Washington D.C.. D.C. was built, and then built the palace (or Versailles, or the Forbidden Palace) as a more efficient central location, i.e., reducing maintenance.

Click to expand...

Yes, that's true. Of course, it doesn't fit in with what you were saying before, because that has to do with New York in modern times. By this logic, a completely different city should be the capital and New York shouldn't even be on the city list (Probably it should be Dutch?) Fortuntately, though, there's a simple game mechanic that fairly decently describes this situation. America was a colony that gained independance, then built Washington and moved its capital there.

Dryhad said:

All of those were also the palace city. The fact that they were also the most important cities of their respective nations is immaterial. It certainly doesn't mean you should just shoehorn the American civilisation into this situation.

Click to expand...

Why is that immaterial? What I've said is that there are two main measures which can be used to describe the initial city - first, whether it is the seat of government, and second, whether it is historically the most important city of that Civ.

By and large, the question is irrelevant for most Civs in the game, as the cities are either one and the same (the cities I listed) or there is an obvious most-important-city, such as Mecca for the Arabs.

The Americans are a dramatic exception to this, and are therefore problematic.

Arkaeyn said:

Why is that immaterial? What I've said is that there are two main measures which can be used to describe the initial city - first, whether it is the seat of government, and second, whether it is historically the most important city of that Civ.

Click to expand...

And what I've said is that the second one is not part of the criteria. The fact that you can list some capitals that were also important cities in their own right doesn't mean anything. To justify this you'd have to find an example of Firaxis actually doing what you're proposing: Selecting a more important city as the first city at the expense of the historical capital.

Arkaeyn said:

The Americans are a dramatic exception to this, and are therefore problematic.

Click to expand...

Problematic nothing! Unlike ancient civilizations where the "capital" was just a de facto residence of the government due to it being a prosperous trading centre, the United States actually has a capital. It is totally unambiguous. Why overcomplicate it?