Changing the Default City Name List & Spy Name List

[Morfeas]

Hello,

My goal is to go over every single civ's city name list and spy name list and change, delete and/or change the order of certain entries. I had done this in the past and I thought I knew how to do it without using a mod, but then certain problems arose:

In the past I successfully changed the name of Carthage's city "Hippo Regius" to just "Regius":
I changed the entry in CIV5Cities_Expansion located in Assets\DLC\Expansion\Gameplay\XML\Civilizations
and the entry in CIV5GameTextInfos_Cities_Expansion located in Assets\DLC\Expansion\Gameplay\XML\Text\en_US.
I changed up both the <Row Tag="TXT_KEY_CITY_NAME_REGIUS"> and the <Text>Regius</Text> strings, and it worked.

Yesterday I tried changing up the Iroquois city name list. But even though I did the same thing (changed and deleted entries -no order changing yet-) in
the CIV5Civilizations file located in Assets\Gameplay\XML\Civilizations
and the CIV5GameText_Cities located in Assets\Gameplay\XML\NewText\EN_US, the changes didn't take effect;
when I popped a city whose name I had tampered with, the name was bugged out (TXT_KEY_BUFFALO_CREEK blah blah). Which led me to believe that the game was drawing the city names from a different file than CIV5Civilizations. Upon further investigation, I found out that unlike Carthage's city names, Iroquois city names appear in ALL THREE of the expansion folders (vanilla, GNK, BNE), probly because Iroquois are a vanilla civ. So my first question is, which folder's entries should I change up for my changes to take effect in game and override the other folders?

I understand that with the above way of handling things I can change what city names appear in game; but can I also change the order of the names? Is the order that appears in the CIV5Civilizations (or its expansion equivalents) file where the game draws the order from? So if I move entries up or down there, the order will change? This is my second question.

My third question is about deleting names from the list. If I delete a name from the list, will the game default back to a previous-expansion list to fill in? I understand this ties to my previous 2 questions, so it might be a dumb one, but I'd appreciate if someone could thoroughly explain how this works to me.

Then come Spy Name Lists: I tried changing up the Iroquois names (no deleting or changing order here - just renaming) so I opened the CIV5GameTextInfos_Spies_Expansion file in Assets\DLC\Expansion\Gameplay\XML\Text\en_US and changed the entries there. This however had absolutely no effect in the game. Following the logic from the above questions, should I go in the BNE folder and change the names there? What overrides what? In short, how do I rename a (vanilla) civ's spies? That's my fourth question.

And my fifth and final question is, should I maybe not tamper with the game's files directly but instead make a mod for all this? Note that I have absolutely no idea how to do that, but I suppose loading a mod that tells the game to override all city/spy name lists and load the ones I have prepared would be a simpler solution. This however has the drawback of not affecting unmodded games. It also raises the question, if I go the "mess-with-the-game-files" way, how would that affect campaigns (mainly from previous expansions that contain the said civ)?

Thanks for any and all help you may provide, and bear with me through the wall of text.

 

[whoward69]

So my first question is, which folder's entries should I change up for my changes to take effect in game and override the other folders?

It depends ...

The three locations are
Vanilla: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization V\assets\Gameplay\XML
G&K: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization V\assets\DLC\Expansion\Gameplay\XML
BNW: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization V\assets\DLC\Expansion2\Gameplay\XML

If you have BNW and are playing with BNW enabled, you'll either need to change the entries under BNW, or if not there, in Vanilla. However, if you then decide to play with just G&K enabled, you'll need to change those files.

So, to be safe, you'll have to change ALL the files.

I understand that with the above way of handling things I can change what city names appear in game; but can I also change the order of the names? Is the order that appears in the CIV5Civilizations (or its expansion equivalents) file where the game draws the order from? So if I move entries up or down there, the order will change? This is my second question.

Cities are named in whatever order they are returned from the database. It just so happens that this matches the order in the XML files, but it's not guaranteed. There are mods out there to randomise city names

My third question is about deleting names from the list. If I delete a name from the list, will the game default back to a previous-expansion list to fill in? I understand this ties to my previous 2 questions, so it might be a dumb one, but I'd appreciate if someone could thoroughly explain how this works to me.

At game start, the XML files are converted to SQL and then used to create/update the game database. How the game deals with the multiple xml files is base on observation, we don't know for sure as we don't have that source code. If you're editing the base files, you should only need to remove the city name from the most recent expansion. But to be safe, just remove it from all files.

Then come Spy Name Lists: I tried changing up the Iroquois names (no deleting or changing order here - just renaming) so I opened the CIV5GameTextInfos_Spies_Expansion file in Assets\DLC\Expansion\Gameplay\XML\Text\en_US and changed the entries there. This however had absolutely no effect in the game. Following the logic from the above questions, should I go in the BNW folder and change the names there? What overrides what? In short, how do I rename a (vanilla) civ's spies? That's my fourth question.

See answer to question three.

And my fifth and final question is, should I maybe not tamper with the game's files directly but instead make a mod for all this?

Making a mod avoids all these issues as any changes the mod makes to the database are applied after all the game core ones. So you know what'll happen and don't need to guess. In the case of changing/reordering city names, you can just delete everything for a specific civ and add back the cities you want in the required order.

HTH

W