[Development] City Name Suggestions

Even via Shift-~ ?

 

Hey there, sorry for not seeing this sooner, been busy. I've been working on a complete rehaul of the CNM for DoC with full rename data and more dynamic city name changes throughout. I've edited every single city list on the smaller map to some extent. I'm going to attach the lists as they exist currently, which still may be subject to a little editing. I'll probably be working on my own personal translation of these to the big map once I've finished all the rename data, but hopefully they provide some food for thought! As I've said these are specifically for my more dynamic overhaul of the city list, so you'll find "major" cities not present all over the shop - the reason for this is that I've only allowed for cities like, say, Kolkata or Dubai to show up in their relevant era. So think of all these city lists as the cities that each civ would build when they first take this territory.

In particular, the Indian, Ethiopian, Khmer, Indonesian, Russian, Quechua, Mongolian, Aztec, Turkish, Thai and Congolese lists have been almost entirely rewritten. And for my sorrows I wasn't too attached to mapping cities to exact tiles, so one civ might found, say, Turfan on a city 1 tile west from another civ - if I did this it was because the city could feasibly fall in either tile and there was another historically accurate city I wanted to cram in! But of course it's a design choice and not one that's particularly precious to me. If there's any instance where a city could feasibly be founded "twice" in two different locations more than a tile apart (which would resort to the civ picking from their default list I imagine) then it's an accident on my part and I'd love you to tell me. And in general if you've any questions or problems about any of them please let me know.

 

Ah I knew there was a thread for this hiding somewhere. Just to let you know where I'm at, I've transferred the whole of my CNM+ onto the big map, or rather a spreadsheet that represents the big map. As you can see, with the map being so much bigger there are a lot of holes, but I'm having fun! There's also notes on cities for other noteworthy translations and possible relocations (while many of the cities can move, there aren't too many that would probably move in any given game - outside the ancient era at least). Feel free to add comments on top of this spreadsheet if you've any suggestions, otherwise I'll just keep plugging away.

 

Oh wonderful!
I just checked the spreadsheet.. I remembered doing a similar one back for RFC when I was in high school lol. I think DoC is already around a decade now?

I would suggest put KUTAI for DX50, and change it to SAMARINDA (upon Islam), and perhaps an Easter egg as well there for this will be the location of future Indonesia's capital. While Tepian Pandan (to Tangga Arung) to Tenggarong is a great idea but I think Samarinda ends up becoming the bigger city of them all (and also current East Kalimantan's capital, followed by Balikpapan which was founded in oil boom 1900).The tile should represent the two phase of Kutai: as an ancient Hindu kingdom of Kutai (Martadipura); and as an Islamized sultanate in 1700s as Kutai Kartanegara Ing Martadipura or simply known as Sultanate of Kutai. As you can see in the Wikipedia article, a bit of Samarinda history is also mentioned there.

 

Thanks Ben, I've changed that. And thanks Leoreth! I'm filling in civs one by one, but it'll be a loooong process. We might need repeating names for areas like Siberia, but I'm avoiding them where possible.

 

Just made a copy of the original map with what I'd deem preferable cities highlighted, which is here. It's an odd task as obviously some cities that are very important are also very close by, and stretching across different eras of occupation also makes it a fairly hopeless job, but I think this should at least be food for thought and might help distinguish some of the less familiar areas like the Sahara or the Amazon. It does raise some interesting questions elsewhere: is Paris so important that its correct placement should inhibit Brussels from ever appearing? Is Tyre so important throughout all of history that we don't see Damascus? Is Luxor so important that we probably won't see Cairo? Etc etc etc... not just Babylon-Baghdad after all.

 

I mean for some of them at least, isn't the convention to have them slightly geographically inaccurate so that they can coexist, if both are important enough? E.g. with Memphis-Cairo/Thebes, I think Thebes is intended to be 1S of where it is on your map.

 

My take to the Southern Cone (Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile). Again, a mixture of old and new cities. Please note that in some areas of North Argentina and South Patagonia I had slighted moved some cities locations to allow some important ones giving map distortions.

North Southern Cone

Spoiler :

Paraguay:
Puerto Flor de Lis > Ciudad del Este (20th century)
Villa Occidental > Villa Hayes (20th century)
Fuerte Borbón > Fuerte Olimpio (19th century)
Fuerte Boquerón > Filadelfia (20th century)
Fortín López de Filippis > Mariscal Estigarribia (20th century)

Chile:
Nuestra Señora del Paposo > Antofagasta (19th century)
San Francisco de la Selva > Copiapó (19th century)

Argentina:
San Fernando > Resistencia (19th century)
San Jerónimo del Rey > Reconquista (19th century)
San Fernando del Valle de Catamarca
San Juan de la Frontera > San Juan (19th century)
Córdoba de la Nueva Andalucía > Córdoba (19th century)

Please note that I've made some few changes in the terrain to allow Corrientes, an historic important city in the Argentina Mesopotamia. I've made a point in the Map Suggestions post to explain the changes.

Central Southern Cone:

Spoiler :

Uruguay:
Salto Oriental > Salto (19th century)
Colônia de Sacramento: in Portuguese, given that was founded by then in mid-17th Century; in Spanish, is Colonia del Sacramento.

Argentina:
Las Pulgas > Fortín Constitucional (19th century) > Villa Mercedes (20th century)
Fuerte El Pedroso > Fuerte de la Federación (19th century) > Junín (20th century)
Fuerte San Rafael del Diamante > San Rafael (19th century)
Santa Rosa del Toey > Santa Rosa (20th century)
Confluencia > Neuquén (20th century)
Choele Choel: this name is originally Mapuche. The proper city was founded in late 19th century as Pueblo Nicolás Avellaneda, but changed its name few decades later.

Chile:
Mercedes de Puerto Claro > Valparaíso (19th century)
Santiago de Nueva Extremadura > Santiago (19th century)
Santa Cruz de Triana > Rancagua (19th century)

South Southern Cone:

Spoiler :

Argentina:
Mercedes de Carmen > Carmen de Patagones (19th century)
Manantiales > Paso de Indios (20th century)
Cañadón León > Gobernador Gregores (20th century)
Rawson: founded by Welsh colonists as Trerawson (Rawson village) in honor to a Argentine minister of interior in mid-19th century. In 20th century, a neighborhood of Rawson called Trelew became a proper city and is today the largest city in Chubut province.

Chile:
Concepción del Nuevo Extremo > Concepción (19th century)
Fuerte Recabarren > Temuco (19th century)
Santa María la Blanca de Valdivia > Valdivia (19th century)
Melipulli > Puerto Montt (19th century)
Baquedano > Coyhaique (20th century)
Punta Arenas: this is the largest city in Southern Patagonia and is located exactly in middle of the Strait of Magellan. In real world, would be probably located in Ushuaia title, however given that the river represents the strait, I've put 1N, in Argentine lands.

 

I don't think much to Thebes 1S tbh - it replaces and thus completely rules out Aswan (Syene/Yebu/Elephantine etc), arguably the second most important city of Upper Egypt and definitely the most important city of Upper Egypt in the modern era. I think rejigging the Nile to give Egypt more space at Nubia's expense makes more sense to me, as at the moment I'm finding it tricky to scrap together cities for many areas of Nubia and simultaneously pick cities to leave out in Egypt. Plus of the civs in the game Nubia was only ever controlled by Egypt (for a relatively short time) and England (for an even shorter time really, and as the southern part of their Egypt territory).

 

I mean, if it's a choice between Thebes and Aswan, I'm pretty sure Thebes is more important in every conceivable way. Even today it's the largest city of Upper Egypt IIRC.

 

Huh, looks you're right, although I could've sworn Aswan was the bigger city now. In any case both are still so important I'd much rather include both. As I say I just can't see the disadvantage of throwing in an extra row of Nile between Luxor and Memphis at the expense of squeezing South Sudan, for instance.

Thanks to everyone putting comments on the spreadsheet - I'm currently going thru language by language to try and fill out each language's historical areas (hence why you'll see grey backgrounds here and there - that's me monitoring a certain language's name data, Greek at the moment). Anyway for the most parts I'll look thru comments when I come to individual areas. Looks really useful so far though!

 

Never quite sure when to update you all... but a month seems a good enough interval. I've been fairly busy on band-related stuff past few weeks but I've found some time to knock out some cities on the map anyway. Specifically I've combed thru this thread and incorporated the suggestions regarding Central/South America and Scandinavia. I've also filled in every tile in India, the Chinese core, Europe west of Belarus, Egypt, the Horn of Africa, Arabia, Mesopotamia, Iran and the States. There's two or three points where I've had to use the same city name for two tiles, but for the most part each tile has a unique name, even in the Arabian desert. If you hover over the tiles you'll see my notes which give more details on how the city name may change when conquered by other civs, either thru simple renaming or by relocating (for relocating the form is 'X into Y'; remember in my CNM I try to tie the vast majority of these to specific events that may or may not happen). On top of all that I've also fleshed out some of the more variable city lists, like Latin, Greek, Phoenician, Persian and Byzantine - in other words, city lists that probably won't found the default city for a lot of tiles.

As usual keep comments coming, I've been resolving and incorporating them as I come to them so if I haven't got to one yet it's just because I haven't touched that area yet. Any general feedback too is welcome.

*Oooh and I have one tiny note for the Balkans. With my current layout, which I'm still not sure I'm 100% happy with, I've got Belgrade on the north bank of the Danube at the moment, which isn't correct. However I do think if the river was altered to have Belgrade be back on the south bank it would help me fit in the important Serbian cities and also look a bit more accurate to my eyes... but as with anything it's very subjective.

 

I notice that many tiles are assigned more than one city per tile depending on the language, especially in Anatolia. For me, it's only understandable for the very important ones, those that you get to see in almost every game (e.g. Babylon -> Baghdad). However, doing this for almost every city seems weird and lacks continuity.

Also, based on Leo's new implementation of the city names module (CityNames.py), the founding name is tightly bound to the name of the tile in Cities.csv, so having a tile with a variable name and corresponding translations cannot be handled rather easily anymore.

For instance, Phoenicia founds a city of which its tile is named Qart-Hadasht in Cities.csv. If Rome conquers, it becomes Carthago, a translation of Qart-Hadasht. But, let's say Rome razed it, and a few centuries after, independent Tunis spawns via Barbs.py handling. While it will be named Tunis on found, once its owning civ discovers a tech the CityNames module checks the name of each city, and will rename that back to Qart-Hadasht. If you want it such that it's named Tunis on found and becomes Tunus when conquered by the Ottomans, you have to reassign the name of that tile in-game, as dChangedCities["Qart-Hadasht"] = "Tunis", and the implementation for determining and renaming changed cities still needs to be written (or worse, hard-coded).

 

I think in general I have the opposite mindset; why sacrifice the thrill of variation and increased historical accuracy for the sake of making things easier? And when it comes to areas like Anatolia, it's purely unavoidable. Greece has to found Ephesus, Turkey has to found Izmir, and something similar bears true on almost every single tile.

It's all personal preference of course, and if in the end a more simplified version is accepted I'll just make my own version as an optional modmod.

And yes Leoreth, took ages to locate cities like the Luba and Lunda capitals!