City naming

[Blasphemous]

Yet another thread on a general subject with a small pet peeve to start on.

I hate it that real city names are used when a city is placed off of the naming map. It drives me nuts. The name given to a settlement by the people in it and around it is usually tied into the place itself and its history in some obscure way. Now, obviously we can't model this extremely dynamic facet of reality in the game, but we can at least not use actual names in places they actually didn't exist in. I'm not just ranting here, don't worry. I'm angling for the integration of a minimod that I really loved. AltCityNames. It does something very simple: it takes new lists of city names, which are select randomly-generated names that are designed to sound like real city names for each civ respectively, but are not real, and places these lists instead of the default, real names. The feel of the names is excellent and they never seem out of place with their civ. It makes sense in this mod to have fake names for fake places.

 

[Arkaeyn]

That's actually kind of cool. Unless we make all the civs have a global map, or at least for the various colonies, that would be way better than the English founding Cambridge in Norway...

 

[Red Threat]

I agree with you.

BTW, tell me what you don't like about the city placement system as it is now.

Keep in mind that it was not a simple job, and not everything could be done perfectly (example: I think that the US east coast is the best possible).

 

[Arkaeyn]

I think people are generally happy with the way cities are named now where they have the naming convention. It's just that outside of those conventions, things get weird. In other words, we're spoiled by how good the rest of the city names are.

 

[Rhye]

damn avatar.

I was wondering when I did write "I agree with you" and the rest of the comment... "July 16, the date is today, no way I can't remember what I wrote a few hours ago"
Then I saw the signature: "Hey, who changed my signature?".
And in the end, "Oh, it's RedThreat"

 

[Appren]

I love the city naming in this mod, and I can imagine there's a lot of work behind it, however, for the places where there isnt set historical names for the area, perhaps using random names as the OP suggest could be an option, instead of default civ4 city names. It doesnt really annoy me too much to see a city name horribly wrong, since I can easily rename it myself, but could be an option.

 

[V. Soma]

I have to agree with Blas - it is ugly to see a city name at a place where it doesn't belong to.

Yes, we shouldn't allow real historical city-names in areas that were historically not for the civ in question... it is confusing reality to see e.g. Cambridge in Scandinavia when in my mind I know that the real C. is in England.

 

[Red Threat]

I love the city naming in this mod, and I can imagine there's a lot of work behind it, however, for the places where there isnt set historical names for the area, perhaps using random names as the OP suggest could be an option, instead of default civ4 city names. It doesnt really annoy me too much to see a city name horribly wrong, since I can easily rename it myself, but could be an option.

I have already been thinking at this solution, but it requires some work.

I suppose Rhye also thinks it is not a priority, we'll see...

 

[Blasphemous]

Perhaps also locations of major world cities should be given each civ's name for that city as a name listed in that civ's plotlist, just to get the satisfaction of seeing a big city change names when you take it. It would be insane to do this for every plot of course, but for big cities like Washington, London, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Timbuktu, Mecca, Jerusalem, etc, it shouldn't be an absolute impossibility to at least give a few extra civs the names for them.

 

[Crayton]

Have you made a default map yet, Red Threat. If you did then that option will always be readily available to those making the big decisions .