City Names: Themes?

[Caprice]

Useless question:

Do you have a theme by which you generally name your Civ and cities?

I generally call my people the Capricans and name my first thirteen cities after the colonies of Kobol from Battlestar Galactica. After that, names become sorta arbitrary and I'll either start using the default names or I'll name them after family members/friends. Anyone else do anything similar?

Not like it really matters toward the game strategy (no moreso than naming units). LOL

 

[Efexeye]

I leave them named what they're named. I'm unimaginative like that.

 

[Point13]

I like the history so I leave the city names.

I name the leader after myself only I use my full name because it just seems right.

 

[Exavier]

Well I wrote my own civ to throw in my personal mod... saves me the time of naming my cities.

But My cities are named after stars, constilations, and galaxies

 

[Ogrelord]

the map was Wheel and it was 8 players multi-players game. Wheel is the map where everyone has their own continent/landmass. They all connected at the middle like the spokes of a wheel. I sent a lonely settler at the middle and founded Starbuck Coffee. Served by one Warrior. No one ever attack me.

I named my cities only in mp games after cities, nations in fantasy culture/books such as Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, etc...
other time i name them after corporate franchise.

Just to keep myself entertain cuz some people have to use all their 20 seconds in blazing...

 

[BCLG100]

My theme is whatever sid gives me

 

[Meffy]

Ordinarily I just use a ready-made nation and city names. But in my latest game I altered Egypt into the "Mephitic Empire." We Mephits cleaned up (not that hard when playing one notch below Noble). Almost every city was named after the Latin name of a genus or species of skunks, mustelids, or other small animals.

The capital was Mephitisia, after Mephitis mephitis (that's me; as you can see from my avatar I am a striped skunk). Other early cities had names like Spilogalia, Putoria, Conepatia, Macrouria, Mustelia, Visonia, Mercapta (after mercaptans, the odorous chemicals mephits use as weapons), Martesia, and eventually such exotica as Enhydraea, Mellivorinia, Galictisia, Ictonyxia, Vormelia, Procyonia, Vulpesia, and Ailurinia.

 

[Mystical Fish]

I name mine after radioactive elements like Plutonium, Cesium, and Uranium.

 

[JanusTalaiini]

I name cities depending on their location, so a coastal city located near ice/tundra tiles might be "Frost Harbor", or a city founded on top of a lone hill might be "Hillcrest". I'm geeky like that, though.

 

[SuperBeaverInc.]

I use the default names. I prefer having cities named after real life places. Custom names just feel weird for me. Altough sometimes I will rename captured cities after real places in the civ I am playing. For example say I captured a city from the AI and I was playing the Russians. I might pull out a big atlas and name the cities after lakes or islands in Russia, or old cities in Russia. For example: Novaya Zemyla, Sakhalin, Kamchatka, Stalingrad, Petrograd, Leningrad, etc.

 

[calyth]

I leave them alone, in fact I usually use the leader names anyways. After a while, with all the save file named after your handle, it's hard to tell. Friend of mine who's into the Civ series name his country Utopia and generally use Canadian cities.

 

[Meffy]

In Civ III I once played the Etruscans and chose words from an Etruscan glossary that seemed like acceptable city names. Learned some interesting tidbits of an obscure language that was already extinct by the time Rome achieved fame. (But I did fudge in a few places, using Oscan or Umbrian just because I wanted to use names I thought particularly euphonic.)

 

[Elponitnatsnoc]

I call mine "monocenturion, dicenturion, etc" all the way up to novecenturion. Then I start naming them alliterative titles and other weird sounding names like "Aasch Hayatu" and "Dwelk Tolkhin"

Yes, I'm kind of weird.

 

[Sine Nomen]

When I play as the Arabs, I change all the city names to have more appropriate spellings - Mecca becomes Makka, Damascus Dimashq, etc. I kind of Arabize captured cities as well - Rome might become Ruma or something like that. I do that with other civs too, but Anglicizing names is kind of hard.

 

[DeusPopuliPixlm]

Haven't done anything in Civ IV yet, but in Civ II, I used to settle a lot of cities, so when playing as the "Cyborgs," my capital was HQ, then Alpha Base, Beta Base, ..., 'Alpha Base, ..., ''Alpha Base, etc. Then I started using cities in Michigan in alphabetical order (fudging if I couldn't think of one - maybe use a street name), or American cities in alphabetical order.

 

[flytyer]

I don not do this every game but I have used Lord of the Rings references for citites in the past. I have also used The Hobbit, The Lost Tales, and other Tolkien books.