City Names in Dune Wars

Fenring · Sep 22, 2009

The purpose of this thread is to compile an extensive list of cities for the civs in Dune Wars that would be as canonical as possible. Any argumentations and explanations of ideas what to include and where are welcome. Whenever something is proposed beyond the obviousness of the Frank Herbert's original map, a source needs to be pointed to. The reference material would primarily be first three books of Dune saga plus Dune Encyclopaedia. If they prove insufficient, both later books and Preludes and Interludes and whatever Herbert's son and Anderson produced together may be used too.

The status quo for the v.1.5 is as follows:

Spoiler :

The reference map looks like this:

Ok, all Dune geeks, let us get to work.

Deliverator · Sep 22, 2009

I would probably be better to have a list of the existing ones - showing which faction is which. I know david generated this list, perhaps he could do that.

I produced another version of the map with the aim of improving readability here. All the habitated places from the map should probably be in the pot. I have an idea that Tuek's Sietch could make a good wonder instead of being a city name.

Also, a link to the Dune Encyclopedia. Not sure how much use it will be for this purpose, but it is quite a feat of imagination.

I think david's idea for having a couple of civ related names per civ and then a general pot of names is good. The one exeption might be the Fremen for whom there are probably closer to 20 appropriate names in the fiction.

Fenring · Sep 22, 2009

First step would be to list all available geographical terms before inventing more specific ones and assosciating them with civs.

Spoiler :

This is more or less it. However, there are plenty of unnamed dots on the map. It's easy to inflate the number of cities a bit by creative adding of station/village/sietch/basin/ridge/cave/gap/cliff/chasm/community to the thing we already have.

Before doing this, however, there's one good source of names - the naibs named in Dune Messiah. It's explicitly said that their sietches very often take names after them. We can extend that and use most of the Fremen names we have to create sietches like this. I will devote next post to that.

Fenring · Sep 22, 2009

These are named places:

Tasmin Sink
Hobars Gap
Umbu Sietch
Sietch Makab

And these are just names of naibs (or other notable Fremen that could be Naibs but it was not said) to make places out of them:

Bikouros
Cahueit
Djedida
Abumojandis
Rajifiri
Saajid
Legg
Shishakli
Chatt
Merkur
Fash
Keke
Takim
Korba
Tecrube
Shamir

And some more full place names I just discovered or recalled while browsing:

Cave of Ridges
Coanua
Windgap Sietch
Sietch Abbir
Jacurutu
Plaster Basin

Ahriman · Sep 22, 2009

Dumb question from the Dune maps: what are the Pyon villages? What does pyon mean?

Fenring · Sep 22, 2009

Not damp. Pyon is a lowly worker, the debilitated once-Fremen or an unfortunate offworlder who got addicted to spice but cannot afford it in other way than just staying on Dune, and their descent; destined to live and suffer want in the dirt of graben and pan. Most of them prolly do low-paid jobs in spice mining industry.

Ahriman · Sep 22, 2009

Ah, so pyons (like peons) are just the workers who live in the villages.

I always used to read it as Pylon villages (for some strange reason) and got terribly confused.

davidlallen · Sep 22, 2009

Deliverator said:
I would probably be better to have a list of the existing ones - showing which faction is which. I know david generated this list, perhaps he could do that.

That is what is inside his spoiler in the first post. He copied it from my post in the modpack thread. I copied it from your new 1.5.1 file and stripped the formatting. In my post I had the civilization names in bold so you could see which cities go to which civ, but that is minor.

Hankc · Sep 22, 2009

Most of the names on that list are good, or at least servicable, but the homeworld/starsystem names bugs me. More so than the C&C references, for some reason.

Deliverator · Sep 23, 2009

My favoured capital city names would be:

Atreides - Arrakeen
Harkonnen - Carthag
Fremen - Sietch Tabr

Beyond that it gets harder. Fenring's suggestion of Selamlik for Corrino is OK, but that is really just an audience chamber. Maybe Imperial Seat would be good enough?

Fenring · Sep 23, 2009

I was giving the concept of city naming some further thought. What I really enjoyed was the association of city names with points on map that Rhye's and Fall has. I think it would be good for hardcore Dune map once it is made, but for now on I think that it would be of great sense to associate the name with the type of terrain you find the city upon. Like ergs and bleds and flats go to the cities by the desert, polar somethings go to the polar zones, ridges, peaks and so forth to higher ground, pans and sinks to lower. On a balanced map there should be no problem with exploiting one list and not exploiting the other, but if such thing happens, the less favoured list could just trigger in. Is it codable?

As far as first capital city is concerned - we have virtually no problem with the Fremen. I think the Fremen should have a normal, separate list for themselves that contains only names of sietches - it's easily doable. Then we could either set Sietch Tabr as the first one or let it go random - it could be cool to start with Gara Kulon or Sietch Makab.

The offworld Great Houses and other factions are a major problem. For them, I would not advocate fixing them permanently to any of the Dune cities - there's nothing about them that makes Arrakkeen uniquely Atreides and Carthag uniquely Harkonnen. Both changed hands often, both were handled by Sardaukar or Corrino lackeys at certain point of time before the main plot started.

For the factions, I would go for really generic names for capitals. Noble titles that do not repeat are of help. We can have:

Ducal Seat - Atreides
Baronial Seat - Harkonnen
Imperial Seat - Corrino
Archducal Seat - Ecaz
Earlish Seat - Vernius (I hope we will exchange Malky who is as late as God Emperor into Dominic, Rhombur or Bronso Vernius to be more in tune with main timeline)
Missionaria Protectiva - Sisterhood
Tleilaxu Base - Tleilax

Or anything along the lines. The other names would be either from the Dune features list or later more in that type, like Atreides Outpost, Ecazi Military Base and so forth (a bit like in Planetfall).

What do you think of it?

davidlallen · Sep 25, 2009

The names of capitol cities are the things that players are guaranteed to see over and over again. I do not think we should choose "Ducal Seat" or similar generic names. What do other people think about this?

It is not hard to put in a new list of names. But, it should be 20 cities x 9 civs = 180 names. I agree this is a big project. Alternatively, if you want to point out some particular names from the list, which you hate, we can remove those. I do not recognize where all the names are from, so a generic instruction like "remove the star system names" does not give me quite enough information to do anything.

Ahriman · Sep 26, 2009

I do not think we should choose "Ducal Seat" or similar generic names

These are a little boring.

Possibly taking and tweaking some real middle-eastern earth city/town/geographic feature names might help fill out the 180.

For example:
Heblon
Yatsa
Al Zarqa
Giran Heights
Nalour
Sahab
Kuba
Maklah
Jizran
Sana'ar
Al Sain
Ghammaz
Palmyral
Manbiji
Tartrus

etc. etc.

We can add "Sietch" to the names of many of these for Fremen cities.

We could us tweaked Greek names for Atreides cities, russian names for Harkonnen, chinese or japanese names for ordos, indian names for Tleilaxu ("Bandalong" sounds south asian), german names for corrino.

Deliverator · Sep 27, 2009

I think we should implement a separate list of city names that can be used by all civs as suggested. It sounds simple enough to do. Then civs use the names in their own list of names (which may be only the capital), before moving on to taking names from the new Arrakis place names pot. I think this is a nice flavourful change that is worth doing. Each time you play - different city names go to different civs. It adds a sprinkling of variety and a sense of place to Arrakis - the planet is fixed and not shaped by the factions who vie for it.

Checking the Planetfall implementation of Sea Base names there are two separate lists for each Civ within the tags <Cities> and <SeaBases> in the civilization infos xml. Could give pointers on where to find the code...

We can just keep the list of shared city names in DuneWars.xml I guess. I can do some work on drafting the list based on the info/suggestions here - but the SDK coding is beyond my current reach.

Doing placenames that change with the terrain is a cool idea - but more work. Plus cities may only be built on Sinks and Flatland now, not Mesa.

davidlallen · Sep 27, 2009

I can easily do something related in python. Here is what I propose.

For Fremen, fill in a list of city names in civilizationinfos.xml.

For each other civ, fill in *one* city name in civilizationinfos.xml.

Supply a list of names in a python file, which I will seed with the names from post 3, Fenring's list of named places. You can make this as short or long as you want, with as many varieties as you want.

I will add a python routine which sets the name of the city when built, unless it is Fremen or a capitol city. The routine will randomly pick one name from the list, ensuring no duplicates until the list is exhausted, then it will reload the list and start again.

From python, there is no way to see the list of city names for a civ given in the xml, or to tell when it has run out. With this proposal, that is not needed; I can make strong assumptions about those lists, and override the choice when I need to.

Does this seem like the right approach, or is it too simple?

Ahriman · Sep 27, 2009

Is the idea here that Fremen will have different city names (ie Sietch X) than other civs?

davidlallen · Sep 27, 2009

Ahriman said:
Is the idea here that Fremen will have different city names (ie Sietch X) than other civs?

Yes, that is what was suggested: Fremen have fixed names, all the other civs share a pool. I am neutral, on whether this is an improvement, but I am willing to implement something which seems to be a popular request.

God-Emperor · Sep 27, 2009

davidlallen said:
From python, there is no way to see the list of city names for a civ given in the xml, or to tell when it has run out.

Well, not exactly...

CvCivilizationInfo has both a .getCityNames(i) and a .getNumCityNames() method. CyPlayer also has a .getNumCityNames().

In conjunction with CyStatistics.getPlayerNumCitiesBuilt(iPlayerID), you could probably allow variable length city name lists, only setting the name when the current city is off the end of the list.

But that may be more to mess with than you want. "Just one name" is much easier.

davidlallen · Sep 27, 2009

God-Emperor said:
But that may be more to mess with than you want. "Just one name" is much easier.

I had not actually looked. Thank you for the details. The difference between one unique name for a civ, and a short list of unique names, is small from the gameplay standpoint but harder from the implementation standpoint. I suppose the barbarian civ city name list could be overloaded as the list of common names, so that modders who can edit xml but not python could still change the names.

Deliverator · Sep 27, 2009

For Fremen, fill in a list of city names in civilizationinfos.xml.

For each other civ, fill in *one* city name in civilizationinfos.xml.

Supply a list of names in a python file, which I will seed with the names from post 3, Fenring's list of named places. You can make this as short or long as you want, with as many varieties as you want.

Sounds like a reasonable solution. I guess having the city names in XML requires more work, and editing a Python file is just as easy.

City Names in Dune Wars

Chieftain

Graphical Hackificator

Chieftain

Chieftain

Tyrant

Chieftain

Tyrant

Deity

Warlord

Graphical Hackificator

Chieftain

Deity

Tyrant

Graphical Hackificator

Deity

Tyrant

Deity

Deity

Deity

Graphical Hackificator

Similar threads