LacsiraxAriscal
Below Settler
Hello everyone. Time to finally share what I've been working on for way way too long. I know I said I'd stream today in another thread, but to be honest I've just had one of those days, so I'll stream a little more some other time.
I'm proud to announce the CityNameManager+ release for the "small" map version of Dawn of Civilization. This is in essence a full rewrite of the file that attributes names to newly founded cities and also manages their renames (when conquered, when eras pass, or when other events occur). This is a wide-ranging redo that both completely revamps each civ's city list to be more geographically and historically accurate, and adds far more rename data than you could ever dream of. I've made a full write-up detailing the ethos behind the changes to each language here. But I'll summarise some of the more interesting changes in this post.
The most notable change is the rewrite of city lists. I've done at least minor alterations to every single city list in the game, but many have been completely overhauled. My two main priorities were: to afford as much attention to non-European city lists as had been taken to European ones, and to add a greater level of dynamicism to city lists with regards to historical changes in main urban centres. On the former front, that meant a lot of research went into ancient Indian kingdoms and their capitals, the major settlements of empires like the Songhai, Khmer and Indonesian dynasties, obscure central African proto-nations, and much more. I'm now confident that every civilization has a city list that better represents their history. The ones to receive the biggest overhauls are: Indian, Tibetan, Greek, Ethiopian, Khmer, Indonesian, Malian, Quechua/Inca, Mongolian, Aztec, Turkish (particularly in the Turkic area), Thai and Congolese.
And history takes us onto that other point - ever get tired of seeing a Classical Indian empire found Kolkata, or spawning as Japan to see Shanghai and Qingdao as the nearest Chinese cities? Well no more, as modern cities will no longer appear until an appropriate era or event has occurred.* Instead, cities that defined most of their region's history - like Suzhou or Tamralipta - take precedence. You might find the city is replaced with its modern counterpart when you start to hit later eras, or for many cities you might find you can hold onto your ancient powerhouse for all of history if you play your cards right. Keep control of Sopara as India and continue to watch the city thrive - lose it to England or Portugal and watch as they lose interest in your settlement and replace it with some backwater called "Bombay" instead.
That brings us neatly onto rename data. I've tried to add, essentially, as much rename data as I could find. For some civs, this means almost every old world city - conquer Eurasia as China or Japan and there won't be many cities you annex that don't get translated into your language. The languages that received a medium-to-massive size of rename data are: Indian/Tamil, Chinese, Greek, Latin, Japanese, Ethiopian, Korean, Viking, Arabic, Khmer, Spanish, French, English, German, Russian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Italian, Mongolian, Turkish and Thai. Every list got a few new additions at least (except poor Harappan). Oh, and one more thing...
There are two brand new languages added to the game: Independent and IndependentAlt. That means when a city falls to Independents, Natives or Barbarians, you can expect it to adopt a brand new name. Maybe it'll be a name you're used to - Paris will always be Paris - but often you'll find the city takes a name unique to its own culture. Rather than being a blanket grey omniciv, which you can happily send a few knights in to annex, you'll have to reckon with the fact you're crushing the dreams of a distinct culture that's just trying to forge their own little nation. It was a lot of fun deep-diving into regional languages to source a lot of these names - Europe in particular pulls from all the regional languages that dominated prior to nationalism, while Chinese cities could pull from the names adopted when a minor breakaway state picked a certain city as their capital.
And that's not all - these two independent languages, which are essentially randomised (one is assigned to each of the two independent civs, with the natives and barbarians sharing the first independent language) give an increased level of dynamism to the city lists. An independent city in Slovakia might take a Slovak name, or a Hungarian one - and the varieties of languages independent cities can pull from also changes over time. But that's not all: cities might also shift to a different power centre on the same tile, often permanently. As an example of the amount of dynamism that can happen in just one tile, let's take Armenia. Found Artaxata as Rome, and see the Armenians move their capital to Armavir when they declare independence. Arabia then conquer the territory and establish their power centre in Dvin. After a brief Armenian uprising moves the capital to Ani, Russia finally exert their influence to shift the power centre to Erivan (Yerevan), with the capital remaining there forever after. Or, in another universe, Armenia keep their capital in Artaxata forever - hopefully, you'll never see the same map twice!
A few small caveats. Firstly, I do not speak every single language featured in the game. My transliteration of certain languages, particularly Korean, Farsi/Urdu, Thai, Khmer, Burmese, Tamil, Tibetan and Arabic, may leave something to be desired. If anyone out there is fluent in one or more of these languages I'd love to work further with you on improving the city names if you consider my transliterations to not be up to scratch.
This release is also focused mostly on the Old World, which here means Eurasia-Africa. I've not yet decided on the best way to treat the Americas, though I did still rewrite the three native civs' city lists and add some extra rename data here and there. However, in the future, I'd like to study this a little deeper.
And finally, this is not compatible with the WIP "big map" version of DoC - but making a version that is compatible is my next priority,
To install the expansion, simply convert these two files to .py files (for some godforsaken reason, I can't upload them to CFC as .py) and replace the pre-existing files of the same name with these ones (you should find them in RFC Dawn of Civilization/Assets/Python). The Barbs file simply changes some of the Independent city spawn names. Leoreth expressed interest in incorporating the expansion into the core DoC package, but I imagine if he's still interested, he probably wants to at least test them a bit first - and I figured in the mean time anyone interested in giving it a go can help as well. If you do notice anything awry, please let me know! It's a huge rewrite, and while after a fair bit of testing I'm certain that the majority of things are functioning well, there will certainly be quirks and oddities I haven't spotted.
Thanks for reading, let me know how you get on and if there are any problems. I'll be in France until Tuesday, so won't be able to update the file at all before then, but will try to keep up with replies.
* There are a few exceptions - I can't stop Japan settling Hokkaido before the modern era, and they simply didn't settle any cities beyond the very south of the island until very late. There are other such example scattered around the map, but hopefully not many.
EDIT 1: Minor patch to make 600 AD and 1700 AD scenarios compatible with the expansion. Several of the cities in this scenario contradict the ethos of historicity, namely India in 600 AD, but I don't currently plan to edit these. However, I would recommend when playing the 1700 AD scenario to head to Worldbuilder and change the name of the Spanish city in Yucatan from Ciudad Real to Valladolid, as I use the name Ciudad Real to represent San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas.
I'm proud to announce the CityNameManager+ release for the "small" map version of Dawn of Civilization. This is in essence a full rewrite of the file that attributes names to newly founded cities and also manages their renames (when conquered, when eras pass, or when other events occur). This is a wide-ranging redo that both completely revamps each civ's city list to be more geographically and historically accurate, and adds far more rename data than you could ever dream of. I've made a full write-up detailing the ethos behind the changes to each language here. But I'll summarise some of the more interesting changes in this post.
The most notable change is the rewrite of city lists. I've done at least minor alterations to every single city list in the game, but many have been completely overhauled. My two main priorities were: to afford as much attention to non-European city lists as had been taken to European ones, and to add a greater level of dynamicism to city lists with regards to historical changes in main urban centres. On the former front, that meant a lot of research went into ancient Indian kingdoms and their capitals, the major settlements of empires like the Songhai, Khmer and Indonesian dynasties, obscure central African proto-nations, and much more. I'm now confident that every civilization has a city list that better represents their history. The ones to receive the biggest overhauls are: Indian, Tibetan, Greek, Ethiopian, Khmer, Indonesian, Malian, Quechua/Inca, Mongolian, Aztec, Turkish (particularly in the Turkic area), Thai and Congolese.
And history takes us onto that other point - ever get tired of seeing a Classical Indian empire found Kolkata, or spawning as Japan to see Shanghai and Qingdao as the nearest Chinese cities? Well no more, as modern cities will no longer appear until an appropriate era or event has occurred.* Instead, cities that defined most of their region's history - like Suzhou or Tamralipta - take precedence. You might find the city is replaced with its modern counterpart when you start to hit later eras, or for many cities you might find you can hold onto your ancient powerhouse for all of history if you play your cards right. Keep control of Sopara as India and continue to watch the city thrive - lose it to England or Portugal and watch as they lose interest in your settlement and replace it with some backwater called "Bombay" instead.
That brings us neatly onto rename data. I've tried to add, essentially, as much rename data as I could find. For some civs, this means almost every old world city - conquer Eurasia as China or Japan and there won't be many cities you annex that don't get translated into your language. The languages that received a medium-to-massive size of rename data are: Indian/Tamil, Chinese, Greek, Latin, Japanese, Ethiopian, Korean, Viking, Arabic, Khmer, Spanish, French, English, German, Russian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Italian, Mongolian, Turkish and Thai. Every list got a few new additions at least (except poor Harappan). Oh, and one more thing...
There are two brand new languages added to the game: Independent and IndependentAlt. That means when a city falls to Independents, Natives or Barbarians, you can expect it to adopt a brand new name. Maybe it'll be a name you're used to - Paris will always be Paris - but often you'll find the city takes a name unique to its own culture. Rather than being a blanket grey omniciv, which you can happily send a few knights in to annex, you'll have to reckon with the fact you're crushing the dreams of a distinct culture that's just trying to forge their own little nation. It was a lot of fun deep-diving into regional languages to source a lot of these names - Europe in particular pulls from all the regional languages that dominated prior to nationalism, while Chinese cities could pull from the names adopted when a minor breakaway state picked a certain city as their capital.
And that's not all - these two independent languages, which are essentially randomised (one is assigned to each of the two independent civs, with the natives and barbarians sharing the first independent language) give an increased level of dynamism to the city lists. An independent city in Slovakia might take a Slovak name, or a Hungarian one - and the varieties of languages independent cities can pull from also changes over time. But that's not all: cities might also shift to a different power centre on the same tile, often permanently. As an example of the amount of dynamism that can happen in just one tile, let's take Armenia. Found Artaxata as Rome, and see the Armenians move their capital to Armavir when they declare independence. Arabia then conquer the territory and establish their power centre in Dvin. After a brief Armenian uprising moves the capital to Ani, Russia finally exert their influence to shift the power centre to Erivan (Yerevan), with the capital remaining there forever after. Or, in another universe, Armenia keep their capital in Artaxata forever - hopefully, you'll never see the same map twice!
A few small caveats. Firstly, I do not speak every single language featured in the game. My transliteration of certain languages, particularly Korean, Farsi/Urdu, Thai, Khmer, Burmese, Tamil, Tibetan and Arabic, may leave something to be desired. If anyone out there is fluent in one or more of these languages I'd love to work further with you on improving the city names if you consider my transliterations to not be up to scratch.
This release is also focused mostly on the Old World, which here means Eurasia-Africa. I've not yet decided on the best way to treat the Americas, though I did still rewrite the three native civs' city lists and add some extra rename data here and there. However, in the future, I'd like to study this a little deeper.
And finally, this is not compatible with the WIP "big map" version of DoC - but making a version that is compatible is my next priority,
To install the expansion, simply convert these two files to .py files (for some godforsaken reason, I can't upload them to CFC as .py) and replace the pre-existing files of the same name with these ones (you should find them in RFC Dawn of Civilization/Assets/Python). The Barbs file simply changes some of the Independent city spawn names. Leoreth expressed interest in incorporating the expansion into the core DoC package, but I imagine if he's still interested, he probably wants to at least test them a bit first - and I figured in the mean time anyone interested in giving it a go can help as well. If you do notice anything awry, please let me know! It's a huge rewrite, and while after a fair bit of testing I'm certain that the majority of things are functioning well, there will certainly be quirks and oddities I haven't spotted.
Thanks for reading, let me know how you get on and if there are any problems. I'll be in France until Tuesday, so won't be able to update the file at all before then, but will try to keep up with replies.
* There are a few exceptions - I can't stop Japan settling Hokkaido before the modern era, and they simply didn't settle any cities beyond the very south of the island until very late. There are other such example scattered around the map, but hopefully not many.
EDIT 1: Minor patch to make 600 AD and 1700 AD scenarios compatible with the expansion. Several of the cities in this scenario contradict the ethos of historicity, namely India in 600 AD, but I don't currently plan to edit these. However, I would recommend when playing the 1700 AD scenario to head to Worldbuilder and change the name of the Spanish city in Yucatan from Ciudad Real to Valladolid, as I use the name Ciudad Real to represent San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas.
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