Concept: conditional dynamic names

The dynamic Civ names are among the many great features of the RFC mods and modmods that make it so fun. However, they aren't wholly accurate, and an idea I had would be to tweak them to change based not only on religion and civics, but also on territorial possessions.

Consider the Norse. When they hold territories in Britain and Normandy, their name becomes Empire of the North Sea. When these territories flip or fall, their name reverts to Empire of Denmark and Norway. If they control Sweden (or vassalise them after their spawn), their name becomes Kalmar Union. If the early Norse ever settle Iceland, they become the Vikings (never happens, though - I've never seen the AI in this modmod transport any units via ship). Similarly - the English are known as the Kingdom of England at spawn, but becomes The United Kingdom of Great Britain when it captures and holds Scotland. Germany becomes the HRE if it captures or vassalises Austrian lands (and vice versa - Austria becomes the HRE if it captures or vassalises Germany) while Germany becomes Prussia if it comquers Pomeriania or vassalises Poland. Spain starts as the Kingdom of Castile and León, and only becomes the Kindgom of Spain after conquering and/or vassalising Cordoba, and the Spanish Empire after building X number of colonies.

Other civs with multiple names include Lithunia & Poland (Kingdom of Lithunia/Poland > Grand Duchy of Lithunia/Polish Commonwealth > Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), France (loads of possible names), Austria (only known as the Habsburg Empire when it's holding imperial lands) while other civs (Genoa, Venice, Portugal, Rus') don't have any alternate historical names.

The thing is - I'm not a code-writer, so I have no clue how tough this would be to implement, and whether or not it would be worth the time & effort (or how much extra processing and therefore slowdown this would cause). I know it's at least possible, since the game can check provinces and vassals held for UHVs, so perhaps the two could be linked if stand-alone coding for the names is too difficult/involved - IE the dynamic names change based on UHV goals achieved (for example the Norse become the Empire of the North Sea after achieving the Conquerers goal).

 

All of the code is there, all that we need is the names.

We had a working version of dynamic names, the problem was that they were not tied to the provinces and they had made it hard to add new civilizations (like Lithuania). The current scheme is far more flexible, but the names need to be added.

 

in length ...

would it be possible for cities to be renamed halfway through the game eventhrough they don't change owner? at least a fair share of Norse cities should change name through time (Roskilde -> Kobenhavn somewhere 1100's, Lindholm -> Aalborg, same period, Tonsberg -> Oslo,same period ... get the drift ... most of their cities should change somewhere around that)

 

Short answer: NO

Long answer: we could do that, but it would require a lot of code and effectively running two city name maps for each civ. This means we have to start picking on which city should change name when.

Rhye has something like that, but it covered only the major cities and in his case those were really major cities (like capitals). The code was also very clumsy, basically checking city by city against a number of conditions.

 

You couldn't use some modified version of the code that changed Russian cities to their Soviet names while in a Communist government?

 

That was the messy code that I was talking about.