The dutch city of Holwerd

I was so eagerly anticipating the game, that I had a friend buy the game and fly it in. I have been playing for an hour now and I like it.

Since I'm dutch, I' decided to give them a try. BUT after building all those great dutch cities I wanted a next one to see which are all in it. The 11the city I build is called Holwerd¿?

I never heard of it.!!!

So I looked it up in the atlas. It is a village of under 5000 people!!!
I know our country is small. But this is stupid!!!

I tried to build 2 more cities to try it out but fortunatly it then goes on with Middelburg and Delft. (actual cities)

I think I heard that England has a couple of weird cities too. It seems odd that modern cities don't get the best first.

BTW, does the city have historical significance? Maybe it just isn't important now.

Holwerd is a frisian city.

EDIT: it's where you get on the ferry to Ameland
If you read dutch, check this, I'll translate some later.

At first I thought it was one of the eleven frisian cities, but it isn't, d'oh. My parents used to live in the frisian capital but have moved to a tiny village, 3 kilometres near Holwerd.

They really should be more careful when picking the cities...
Like, for France, I will surprise you folks, but it's "Lyon" (and not "Lyons") and Reims (and not "Rheims").
It really bothers me the programmers didn't even take 30 seconds to check in any atlas that the cities they chose were sensible and correct.
Furthermore, I even mailed them before vanilla CIV was out to warn them about it (I saw that on some pre-realease screenie) and guess what ? They didn't care. I don't think it's a huge thing to correct. But since it's not the names of US cities, I guess they weren't as careful
What about "Wachington" or "Seetle", for a change ?

They picked the english spelling...



Hehe...

Well, whether it belongs in there or not is depending on the rest of the city list I think. The site says the city has had 'quite some significance in the middle ages'... You must know that in the middle ages the country what is known as 'Holland', actually just two of the western provinces, wasn't very developed. Cities like Zwolle and Kampen, former members of the Hanze, were the most significant cities...

But in this case I doubt if they're correct. Dokkum, the nearest city, has had some real significance. It is the place where the frisians murdered St. Bonifatius. It's also one of the eleven frisian cities, so I assume that they wanted to pick that one...

Holwerd lies near dokkum, on the map you can see the pier of the ferry...

Originally posted by Shabbaman
They picked the english spelling...

Click to expand...

They didn't ever bother to give me that lame excuse.

Masquerouge you make an interesting point here.
Contrary to what people tend to think city (or country) names are not like person names which never change whichever language.
Example : Beijing or Peking has nothing to do with the Chinese name or Greece is called Hellas in Greek.

So in the case of France in Civ3, these are the names those cities have in American/English : Marseilles and Lyons...

It s not a mistake from the programmers

just rename the city after you build it.

problem solved.

Well, it's not like they picked the best American cities, either. I think Seattle is one of the first 10.

Hey, I have been in Holwerd! Indeed when I was going to Ameland.

My guess is that the ancestors of one of the Firaxis' developers came from Holwerd. They were probably seafaring and agricultural... And didn't know anyting about commerce !

Originally posted by Skyfish
So in the case of France in Civ3, these are the names those cities have in American/English : Marseilles and Lyons...

It s not a mistake from the programmers

Click to expand...

Okay, but Rheims ? With an H ? And I don't remember the added S in the english names... Are you sure of that ? because here is an excerpt from "The guardian", just got it on the net :
"Several cities, including Marseille, "

And Ben E gas : I don't need to rename the cities, the name's correct in the french version

If they put in Holwerd..did they put in Alkmaar (Alkmaar is a descently large city with 100.000 civilains..it was also the sity that the spanish NEVER managed to captured "Alkm aars ontzet")

They could have any reason for adding Holwerd(which Id on't know) maybe it had som significant importance in teh past.

Originally posted by thestonesfan
Well, it's not like they picked the best American cities, either. I think Seattle is one of the first 10.

Click to expand...

Ya and Los Angeles. Shouldn't it be a little higher on the list

I usually rename the cities anyway.

Originally posted by Masquerouge
They really should be more careful when picking the cities...
Like, for France, I will surprise you folks, but it's "Lyon" (and not "Lyons") and Reims (and not "Rheims").

Click to expand...

I noticed Rheims in a Civ2 game. I added a couple of French cities for a scenario. One of them was Reims. I popped a settler from a hut and founded a city. The city was: Rheims. Kind of ruined the point there.

Originally posted by Louis XXIV


I noticed Rheims in a Civ2 game. I added a couple of French cities for a scenario. One of them was Reims. I popped a settler from a hut and founded a city. The city was: Rheims. Kind of ruined the point there.

Click to expand...

and you're right : those stupid spelling mistakes date back from CIV2. I told Firaxis that, too.
The thing is, who besides us french, who play with the french version and thus the correct city names, care ?
...
Anyone ?
...
Thought so.

This seems like the best thread to bring this up. I was going to start a new one but it's not that important. (Just rename the cities yourself! lol)

I've just noticed that they have heavily reworked the city list for the Russians.

The old one: (PTW)
Moscow
St. Petersburg
Kiev
Minsk
Smolensk
Odessa
Sevastopol
Tblisi
Sverdlovsk
Yakutsk
Vladivostok
Novgorod
Krasnoyarsk
Riga
Rostov
Astrakhan
Kharkov
Grozny
Dnepropetrovsk
Maikop
Kursk
Kuibyshev
Magnitogorsk
Uralsk
Kazan
Vologda
Murmansk
Vitebsk
Batum
Tiflis
Bryansk
Tula
Kalinin
Yaroslavl
Krasnovodsk

The new one: (C3C)
Moscow
St. Petersburg
Novgorod
Rostov
Yaroslavl'
Yekaterinburg
Yakutsk
Vladivostok
Smolensk
Orenburg
Krasnoyarsk
Khabarovsk
Bryansk
Tver'
Kazan'
Novosibirsk
Magadan
Murmansk
Irkutsk
Chita
Samara
Arkhangel'sk
Chelyabinsk
Tobol'sk
Vologda
Omsk
Astrakhan'
Kursk
Saratov
Tula
Vladimir
Perm'
Voronezh
Pskov
Staraya Russa
Kostroma
Nizhniy Novgorod
Suzdal'
Magnitogorsk

I'm not sure why they changed the list. I suppose some of the other lists have been changed too.

Is russian C3C in cyrillic ?

Why'd they get rid of Keiv?

The only reason I can think of is if they moved it to the Vikings or Byzantine.

In the Russian city list of C3C they deleted all the Ukrainian and Belarus cities and added more Russian ones. So I actualy like those changes.
I'm Dutch too and also got a game fly in from the states and was as amazed as Schmek about the choice of Dutch cities on the list as Holwerd as 10th city, 16th Harlingen and Lauwersoog as 17th. From those three small villages the boats to four of the isles in the Waddensea leave. From Howerd to Ameland, from Harlingen to Vlieland and Terschelling and from Lauwersoog (a very small village I didn't even knew it existed) to Schiermonnikoog. (On the list the 15th town of Den Helder has the boat to the fifth isle of Texel). I think they used an atlas were boatconnections are important (because of the saefaring trait) but I think they used a modern atlas and not an historical one, so important harbour cities from those days as Kampen, Vlissingen and Hoorn are ignored.
But I don't think there were any Dutch Betatesters too tell them that. Especially also because they used the wrong picture to make the leaderhead for William of Orange. Almost all the male leaders of our county are named William of Orange and they used the one who was king of England instead of the correct one. Every Dutch person knows how the original (also named "father of the fatherland" and founder of our country) looks so I think my countymen will be very amazed when the game is released here the day after tomorrow (?). It's like calling him Washington and picturing him as Lincoln.