[MOD] Medieval: Conquests

[drjest2000]

I was testing a new civ in M:C and had a strange thing happen. I had copied the Anglo-Saxons and the Pope associated with them for "Jorvik", made the appropriate changes to the additions, and a very weird thing happened. On the first run, on turn 2, I scored a conquest victory....

o_0

I found the problem, when adding The Pope, out of habit I'd changed the Pope to Water Start since that's the default for Kings in vanilla, but I haven't given the Pope any boats, that was the problem (I think).

Then I started a new game and tried again. This time, the Pope never pops up to ask me if I'm going to be a good boy and kiss his ass, instead he was replaced by Oconostota as the "Barbarian Leader" with no text showing up in the dialog pop-ups....

-_0;;;

So, I exit the game, empty my cache and try again. Still weird. So, I start crawling through the XML files that I'd changed, examining my changes line by line. I can't figure out the problem.

I remember reading that the Core will become unstable if things aren't located where it expects them to be. So I try changing the position of the additions are located in the XML... I restart the game, start a new game and see what happens...

...moving the playable civ to the top of the CivInfos file and adding the civ's europe above the natives/barbarians fixed the problem.... only it doesn't.... I didn't notice at first, but when I got a ding telling me that I was running out of room for spice, I looked at the city and, well, I had spice production and a butcher's house.... which in 50 times playing I'd never seen before.

Again, I go back to the XML files and try debugging the problem. I hadn't set the derived civ for the Pope civ to match the Jorvik civ....

o_0

I changed this... then it occurred to me... Europeans without Kings = Playable Natives? 0_0

Could it really be that easy?

 

[Nightinggale]

Just my two cents... But arguably a harbor crane could be said to increase a city's efficiency/productivity (+10% production of finished goods) or the speed that finished goods are sent to foreign market (+1 movement ships).

How about: loading or unloading cost one move unless there is a crane in town. That would make them interesting to use for trading ports. We could argue that horses wouldn't use the crane, but I would vote for simplifying the code to ignore such logic.

I'm playing the "Official Version" with the 2.0a patch. My ISP doesn't like Git :/

Tried the bat file? It actually accesses git using https to avoid such a problem.

Now that you mention it, I have noticed the workers building roads/paths on the roughest terrain possible. But it was not all that different from the way things work in vanilla. However, in vanilla, the first route is often altered/modified after the "click release". I think that there is a broken link in the AI to some "clean up" routine in the path AI.

I always thought it had something to do with how the AI plans where the road should be while ignoring the terrain. Something like: I have to go 3 left and 2 down. Calculates a path for that while ignoring terrain. Can the unit walk on all tiles? If yes then build.

I never really looked into the problem though.

Now that you mention it, there have been a whole lot of Animals/Bandits on the screen at the time of the crashes. I mean a crazy lot. When I open the save-file in WorldBuilder to see what might have caused the crash, the amount of Animals and Bandits is kinda of crazy. I don't know what you have the bad guys linked to for generation, but if FaireWeather has created a map with a central plateau with a large area of open tundra, I've seen 5 - 8 polar bears in a very small area.

I think I fixed that bug in the git version

Date: Fri Jun 28
Fix: AI will no longer order units to attack cities unless the unit is allowed to move into the city tile

I never had the issue myself and nobody provided me with a savegame (even though I asked), but it turned out that RaR had a similar problem and I fixed it in RaRE. Looks like a vanilla AI bug, which is triggered due to added restrictions to units. This mean we could debate if it's a bug or that we want more from the vanilla code than it's designed for.

what about multiplayer? try to use, but no see host game in lobby, any advance?

I plan on using it in a network. I just need to fix it first as multiplayer issues was never considered when coding this mod. This mean it's likely not a one night job to do, but I will reach it eventually (hopefully). I would like bug reports like "when I do this it desyncs right away". That will give me a clue to were something went wrong. Most if not all desyncs are caused by local handling of user input, which should have been transmitted over the network. This is why finding the offending user interface is the key to fixing such bugs.

Also, how deep do you want me to go in re-writing the XML? For instance, a couple of the city names for the Anglo-Saxons are actually Welsh. Do you want to stick with modern English names? or would prefer to see historically accurate names (e.g., Lundene is Anglo-Saxon for London, Eoforwic = York, Haestingas = Hastings, Cantwareburh = Canterbury, etc)

Personally I would prefer using the modern names. We know whose and where they are. Using old ones can create interesting problems like having Eoforwic present and then the vikings build a town called Jorvik. All of a sudden two names for York appears at the same time. Maybe not really an issue as the game doesn't have an issue with it and honestly most players will never notice that Eoforwic and Jorvik is the same place.

One interesting note about Jorvik is that half of the word is the same as in viking. Most people split it vi-king (we are kings or whatever meaning you could put into that), but instead they are vik-ing. "ing" mean "people of" and "vik" mean bay. Viking mean "people living in bays". Norwegian people only lived at the bays while the rest of Norway was populated by a totally different people and presumably they had no problem with this division. Denmark was also mostly islands and bays at the time. The ice age compressed Denmark and like a compressed sponge the land raises when the pressure is gone (even today) also it was hotter back then than today and the sea level was higher. Those two combined meant you could go almost everywhere in Denmark by boat. In other words calling the Danes "the people living in bays" would also be fitting. Not sure about Sweden, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had a division of the land like in Norway.

Not sure who came up with the name viking. Vik is Norse. -ing is used in English city names, though Danelaw left more than 3000 Norse placenames, which are still used today. The vikings referred to themselves as "men of the north". Those people still do, but time changed the name to Norwegians. The people living further down referred to themselves as Danes. Not sure about the vikings of the east.

I don't know the word Jor and because of that I have no idea which kind of bay York was meant to be.

I was thinking of adding Powys and/or Gwynedd and the Danelaw with Canute as the LH (which were were extant during the time of Alfred the Great and a source of great discomfort for the Anglo-Saxons). You've got the continent covered pretty thoroughly, but British Isles seem a little weird without Picts and Welshmen to cause a problem

Personally I have an issue with the name Canute. The vikings called him Knútr. Scandinavia calls him Knud. The Germans called him Knut. The English call him Cnut, though for some reason Canute is used more often. I don't really have a problem with the different spelling, but Canute is a seriously different word and I don't know the origin of that word. I have to admit it took me quite a while before I realized who Canute actually is. At first I was "a new viking king I never heard of. Wow, I though I kind of know those guys". Turned out I knew him under a different name
Cnut and Alfred shares the name "the great". The main difference is that Cnut was called that by his people while he lived while Alfred was named that by the Victorians, who noticed England never had a king referred to as "the great".
The vikings had a tradition to name after grandparents and giving lastname after the father (common practice until the 19th century and is still used in Iceland and possible other places like the Faeroes Islands), which naturally lead to the risk of multiple people being named the same. This wasn't a problem to the vikings as they practiced "nicknaming" people to tell them apart. Cnut's read viking name would be Knútr Sveinnson (his father was Sweyn Forkbeard). The great is naturally a translation and the Norse name is Knútr inn ríki (looked it up on wikipedia). I'm not a norse expert, but it looks to me that it would be more like "Cnut with the kingdom" or something like that, referring to his expansion of the kingdom. Maybe I read it wrong though so I contacted one who can actually read Norse (yep I have such a contact. It's outside the gaming community though). The reply here is that my interpretation is not uncommon. However there is also a possible translation that it tells something about his mind, like Cnut the great thinker or Cnut the kind. Somehow my insights in the viking mindset makes this translation the most likely. We will never know for sure though.

Cnut's great^3 grandfather was named Cnut and Denmark had a total of 6 kings with that name within 300 years. The idea with adding numbers to kings of the same name came later. Actually I think it was used elsewhere at the time, but used later in Scandinavia after the viking age ended and foreign traditions started to move in.

Also worth noting, I am certain that in general some of the bugs I am encountering relate to my system being so antiquated. I'm still on a 32-bit XP system, so Civ4Col has always been a little buggy on it. Civ4BTS runs without any problems, but that's another beast with a different hide.

I have a 32 bit laptop and it fails to start M:C even though I played TAC in a network with it with no problems. I haven't looked into why main menu fails, but I do that. I would love it to work with M:C and will likely do a closer examination even on the problems you encounter. Don't stop reporting problems even though you are on a 32 bit system. Do mention that you are on a 32 bit system each time though as it is helpful to track down the issue.

Odd phrases like "the more, the merrier" only exist in English today because of the Scandinavians.

And who knows, if things had gone a little different Harald Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, William of Normandy might have met Harald Hardrada rather than Harold Godwinson at Hastings, and we'd be be writing to one another on this forum in something looking more like Icelandic than modern English

Oh dear. My Icelandic is a bit rusten If I attempt to write anything in Icelandic, then you wouldn't be able to understand it

With that scenario the world would be a better place. Think about it. For starters while we talk about viking kings we do know that women were more equal to men than in countries which converted to Christianity. I really like the Greek text talking about people in the north, whom they traded with (different era, but the conflict of mindset is the same). They were outranged because they dared to drink wine. Every Greek knows that you are supposed to mix wine with water 1:1 before drinking it. Also in a conflict they can decide to have a 3rd party as a mediator. That on its own is ok, but they sometimes pick a female mediator. That is really outrageous.

Hey I just realized something really interesting while writing this. Look at this map of Reformation

Spoiler :

Vikings turned protestants while other people didn't. Germany was populated by Danes as they moved south around 300 BC (This explains the DNA issue with telling Danes and Saxons apart in the BBC documentary Blood of the vikings, though whoever made that documentary was not aware of this). Germany is a country of mixed people, but they did stay outside of the Roman empire. England converted, reverted (Bloody Mary) and then converted half, creating a unique mix. It's also just half viking Scotland remained catholic in the highlands and became Calvinistic in the lowlands. An interesting part here is that the Roman scribe Tacitus in 1st century AD in the lowlands (Aberdeen area I believe) was a tribe, which was the same tribe as Wendelfolk (not sure of spelling) in the far north western part of Denmark. They had to be the same tribe as they shared culture and language. This is interesting on so many levels and in many contexts. In this context I dare to say that the lowlands were no strangers to the way of thinking of the vikings. The eastern dots almost precisely match where the eastern vikings settled. Sure there are some dots in Poland and such which this theory can't explain, but for the most parts this matches. I find this discovery quite interesting. While I have seen people talk about later development of catholic vs protestant countries (like the Euro debt crisis hits catholic countries only) I have not seen a "guideline" line this to explain why some countries converted and some didn't.

Heh, I just used that phrase except the spellchecker changed it to merry-er

Pfff. American spell checker
I prefer using UK English. However when writing in the browser the spell checker for each text field goes to "autodetect language" and any English is detected as US English. That's bloody annoying and I don't feel like going into the menu and change it every time and I end up writing US English because it's easier. I'm sure NSA influenced the autodetection to ensure US spelling to make their software work more efficient when reading the posted text
It's actually a guy who didn't bother to tell the different Englishes apart and decided to use US as default because most people likely would prefer that one (which is likely true). It just looks silly that I can write a UK text where all text is accepted by the spell checker. Next time I open the very same text, it is autodetected as US English and full of red lines.

Hah! This not the post you were expecting, is it? Be sure to flame me if I did wrong to post this. I thrive on stress!

With you I would have been disappointed if you didn't do something like this sooner or later

Very funny read.

Yeah. Got to love Mastrude. You never know when he will be funny like that, though this time it really did take me by surprise. Most likely the most entertaining spam I received. It even beats the email selling pills, which would make me resistant to radiation. I was playing fallout at the time and just had to forwards that mail to another player.
Presumably (unless it was a complete hoax) it would be iodine tablets, which reduces the likelihood to add radioactive iodine to the body, but does nothing about any other type of radiation. Faulty reactors tend to leak iodine isotopes, which is why such pills are stockpiled and (at least in the rules) handed out to the population if a nearby nuclear plant shows problems.
However it never told why it would work or more than that it was against radiation and it sounded kind of like you could go into red radiation zones without protection if you take such a pill first. It was really funny and it really promised way more than science can deliver.


Oh dear. This post became a bit longer than planned. That's your fault for writing so many useful posts to reply to
You wrote a whole page of posts while I looked away

 

[orlanth]

Sure it should be quite possible to have playable Natives without a "King" civ - in 2071 a main reason for the King civs was to give access to the Europe screen for trade, but in M:C you can trade locally without this (& could maybe "discover" Europe screen later as natives via trade points) so that wouldn't be necessary. In vanilla having a King civ is needed for a set of good & unit prices, not sure if that's still the case in M:C but it eventually wouldn't be if prices are set at the city level.

But if there's no King, no taxes & no Revolution what's your plan for the overarching strategic obstacles & goals for playable natives? I guess some possible ideas for alternate victory conditions could be
Enlightenment Victory (discover x top tier techs)
Industrialization Victory (build x top tier buildings)
Economic Victory (produce/sell x gold worth of goods)
Cultural Victory (be producing significantly more "crosses" than any other player?)
Conquest Victory (kill maim kill!)

As for a good strategic obstacle to replace taxes I'm not so sure? Perhaps if they start out behind enough with a lag till they start development it will be enough of a challenge to survive long enough to build up & thwart Colonial expansion.

 

[drjest2000]

@Orlanth - in the context of M:C, the "natives" would include the Britons/Welsh, which, ca. 455 AD, were vastly more civilized than the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. As I recall, they supposedly hired the barbarian Angle, Saxons, and Jutes as mercenaries to defend their coasts from Irish raiders (pirates, whatever). And it was the Britons that converted the Franks and Anglo-Saxons, and taught them to read/write. Then later did the same with several other barbarian tribes in Eurpe, including the Danes. So, I'm thinking the notion of playable natives in M:C is categorically different from North American natives.

And in a East Indies setting, same thing, the invaders/colonists are the barbarians and the natives are the civilized people.

Only in the context of muskets vs. flint/obsidian is there really a tech gap that is significant enough to merit a long struggle to achieve technological parity.

Taking this to the New World, say in the case of the Tarascans (who definitely had bronze working at the time of the Conquest), compare them to the Mexica (who were metal poor except for gold/silver). The Tarascans were able to force the Spanish to sign a treaty, the only example of a treaty in the history of the Conquest. This seems to me a perfect example of when inferior technology is made up for by sheer numbers.

Almost always, historically speaking, it was European diseases for which the natives had no immunity that won the New World for the Europeans. Diseases that primarily originate in European/Asian/African domesticated animals: Chicken pox, Cow pox, Horse pox, even Small pox, all originate in our domesticated animals then mutate and make the leap to Homo sapiens.

Recent studies in immunology and epidemiology have caused re-calculations of population density of native peoples in pre-Columbian North America, and the numbers are chilling. As many as 90% of the native population had already been killed by novel viruses by the time recorded colonization efforts began. Most likely, those novel viruses were introduced by the Vikings or French fishermen who regularly visited the north-east coast of North America as early as the 1200s. So it must be understood that in the Americas, the Europeans encountered native societies that were post-catastrophe and which largely do not represent what might have been discovered only 200 years earlier. That's how it rolled in the Americas, not how it went in the other parts of the Earth, and my ambition is to "de-Americanize" Civ4Col as much as possible.

The Americas are not the same as European/Asian/African colonization efforts. For instance, much of the methodology used in the conversion of the American natives was based almost entirely on the Barbarian conversion efforts in late medieval Europe. The Barbarian converzion had only been completed for about 125 years by the time that Columbus "discovered America". I have a book around here somewhere that puts forward the whole history of the Barbarian conversion by monastic communities "in their own words". It's a very interesting read and something of an eye-opener on how the "Church" changed tactics and theology over time.

In the case of the East Indies, by the time that Columbus rolls onto the scene, India has had 5000 years of civilization and trade with Europe, ditto for Africa, ditto for most of Asia. I will point out that the common chicken originated somewhere in southeast Asia, yet was called the "holy bird" by the Romans, so since remote antiquity there was a veritable highway of trade between Europe and much of Asia/Africa. The Spice Route and Silk Road both originate in a time when there were still dynastic pharaohs in Egypt.

By the Time Columbus sets foot on Hispaniola, the Europeans had lost and re-discovered the Classics, thanks almost entirely to the Muslim "barbarians". And, depending on how you count them, there had been nine or ten crusades that had ended in a long defeat for the Europeans, so when the Americas loomed onto the religious horizon, the magnates of Christendom wanted to make up for the shameful loss. And the Spanish monarchies were all still trying to make up for centuries of having been Arian heretics (Nota Bene: Arian, not Aryan). So what transpired in the Americas was much more than a colonization effort, it was an un-named crusade against the heathen barbarians of the Americas. A crusade which they approached with all the intolerance and zeal of the crusade in the Holy Lands or that of the Teutonic Knights against the heathen Lett.

Anyway, returning to my point, my contention is that not every native is a knuckle dragging stone age caveman with nothing but a sharp stick (there were those to be sure, but not all that many, because other natives who had graduated to using sharp rocks pretty much killed them off). I don't think there's any point in even playing a caveman vs muskets scenario, it's a foregone conclusion that, by one road or another, the cavemen lose. So, when I speak of "playable natives", I don't mean the ones in the shallowest end of the technology pool, but those somewhere nearer the middle depths, like the Tarascans, the Mexica, the Maya, and the Inca in the Americas. Maybe the Iroquois and the Huron. But I don't think that the Apache represented a real threat to the expansion of European-originated civs, not even a little. In the case of the Apache and other western tribes, their successes were based entirely on the low population of Europeans. Once the Europeans started pushing the matter, we see where history went.

But there were moments in the early days of the Conquest of the Americas when the matter hung in the balance with little certainty who would end up in control of the Americas. The Tarascans were defeated by smallpox, not muskets. The Inca too.

Also, I don't think that technology should be over emphasized as the only obstacle to a playable native "win". Tax? Who needs a tax burden when every few turns there's the chance that all of your villages will be reduced to 1 population or even destroyed by an epidemic? The way I see it, it's not just the tech tree that is the problem, but having enough people to make the tech tree work to your advantage. Think of "invisible" critters roaming the board like herds of polar bears, mauling everything in their path. Realistically, that's what I envision as the American natives' major obstacle to achieving a victory, not the technology.

Recent experiences with herds of polar bears in M:C made it rather obvious to me that that sort of scenario was not a game that I wanted to play. But, I would still like to make playable natives, I just don't see how making it historically accurate would make it fun. The longer I look at it, the less shiny it becomes. The American natives were doomed by gunpowder, germs, and steel. Mostly germs. So, if we keep looking at the Americas, we're going to have to break from absolute historical norms and move into "what if". I'm not suggesting that we give the Apache jet fighters and mechanized infantry, but if we don't give them some kind of advantage, at least something of a fighting chance, we may as well leave the code undisturbed.

So I am looking at playable European and Asian natives to see how the first steps in achieving a balanced play can be achieved. For the moment, because of the "disease won the west" thing, I am excluding American natives from my thinking. I'm not abandoning them as a topic, just putting them on the back burner as I look for ways that M:C might provide a way to let there be a "Cherokee State" (a historical reality with a constitution, a president, a congress, etc, that existed until their forced removal in 1830). I just don't know how to get "there" from "here" yet.

 

[orlanth]

Yeah, making a fun and playable challenge with flexibility to try out a wide variety of possible alternate histories definitely needs to trump simply re-enacting circumstances as they happened. It'll definitely be good to have natives who aren't an automatic pushover but at least have potential to be an actual competitor..

From a gameplay & balance standpoint, don't underestimate the huge strategic head start all "natives" of any sort will get from beginning with vastly more cities, land and population already in place. It can take easily 100 turns or more for non-natives to simply start to catch up to them in that respect. In the vanilla game this doesn't matter since natives can do virtually nothing at all, but once they're not entirely crippled they need to have at least some form of delay to development or other significant disadvantage to offset that. Alternatively you could have plagues automatically kill off large numbers, but most players wouldn't find that very fair or enjoyable

 

[drjest2000]

One of the things I am thinking about is Luxury Food in M:C and how it is used to generate nobles. I'm thinking that the same mechanic in an SciFi setting (like royal jelly for a queen bee) could be used to create specialists the same way a university does in vanilla. I think maybe something vaguely like that could be used to create (let's say attract) a European specialist unit who then builds his "home" effectively putting the discovered technology a purpose might be used. Luxury Food in itself is a brilliant idea. I would stick with the whole life cycle of child, teen, adult (page, squire, noble) and that alone could prevent a tech rush. And just because the natives have spice doesn't mean that it's easier for them to generate luxury food. No easier than it would be for me playing the Anglo-Saxons. 200 units of luxury food shouldn't come easily to hand for anyone.

And before a playable native could even create luxury food they'd have to gain the Manorialism tech or its equivalent.

 

[orlanth]

Hmm interesting ideas! I had thought about having a race of Insectoids in 2071 start as a weak Larva unit and have to be "promoted" to Worker, Soldier, Drone or Queen using the Education system, but the M:C Luxury Food type mechanism could be perfect for something like that.

Anyway, not to distract from discussion of the M:C mod itself. I too love the Luxury Food mechanic and how it works well with the need to acquire Spices from other sources But I'm kind of unsure of whether the AI knows how to use it? Spices and LF are kind of complicated to obtain, and the vanilla AI already does terribly with transport and production of existing yields. Are there any thoughts of how vanilla AI could be further improved, or alternately allow for at least a certain degree of "cheating" at higher levels of Handicapinfos game difficulty when the AI runs into limits of hard-to-get yields?

 

[Nightinggale]

Almost always, historically speaking, it was European diseases for which the natives had no immunity that won the New World for the Europeans. Diseases that primarily originate in European/Asian/African domesticated animals: Chicken pox, Cow pox, Horse pox, even Small pox, all originate in our domesticated animals then mutate and make the leap to Homo sapiens.

You forgot the common cold. That one turned deadly for people who had never been exposed to it before. Also Europe was hit hard by diseases from Asia several times. The black death might have been from China.

By the Time Columbus sets foot on Hispaniola, the Europeans had lost and re-discovered the Classics, thanks almost entirely to the Muslim "barbarians".

Quite a number of the classics were lost because they were conquered by Muslims in the first place. However there is another twist to the story. The Ottoman empire conquered Greece and a lot of the locals fled into Italy. This created a surplus of workforce, which in turn made labor cheap. The Greek craftsmen came up with the idea that they could replicate ancient Greek architecture and some wealthy men decided to try that. The important part here is that it happened in Venice, which at that time was the fashion hotspot. All over Europe people realized the fancy people of Venice started to recreate ancient Greek building styles and art and the Renaissance was born. When the classics were rediscovered, it was into a world which had just started to hunger for anything related to ancient Greece. Perfect foundation for interest in whatever manuscript they could find in the library.

 

[drjest2000]

Well for M:C and any mod using Luxury Food, I would bias the AI to not sell it and exclude it from the forced attrition in the code. Then, I would bias the AI to use whatever sort of unit it creates only for specific professions, be it UNITCLASS_DREAD_OVERLORD or UNITCLASS_BLACK_KNIGHT.

Part of the problem that the vanilla AI has with resources if the conflict between the market prices and the hard coded bias of specialists to pursue their profession at any cost. And I suspect there is a weak link somewhere in the AI for purchases, because I've not seen an AI player purchase a merchantman or galleon until far later in the game than I have. I don't think the AI was really coded for commerce or diplomacy, I am fairly certain that it was designed to run wars against human players. Because, let's face facts, game programmers are not in the habit of coding games of adventure capitalism.

You start seeing the truth of that more clearly when you use the options "Use aggressive AI" and "Always war".

You also see that in the way that the AI settlements always pile up on top of the human player and one another. I call that "the cluster-bomb effect", a cheap trick by programmers to force a conflict... it's as transparent and contrived as an early TV sitcom script.

As another cheap tactic, the AI is probably biased to flood the native villages with goods rather than the Europe screen so that the human player ends up having to travel farther to sell his crap-wares.

I figure coding the AI to chase the highest price for a commodity is going to be counterproductive, because the market is schizophrenic in Civ4Col. Besides, how is a guy in the Americas supposed to know the price he'll get in Europe? What? We're all of a sudden all psychic now? Me, I'd rip that portion of the code out and burn it in an old trash can. I categorically ignore it during play and the AI should too, because if it didn't, it would collapse from nervous exhaustion at some point.

When I play, I always get flooded with European colonists and end up flooding my warehouses, thus needing a merchantman or galleon by turn 50, but the AI player putters along with whatever boat it started with right up until I start my revolution, then the AI gets all "dark and serious". In M:C, the natives sell their wares at a ridiculously low price, in fact, in several games, I was able to buy enough Luxury Food from the "natives" to create three or more nobles. It's obvious that the AI doesn't know the value of what it's selling.

Maybe part of that is the way I play. I always make nice to the natives, buttering them up with gifts and avoiding their land as much as I can, always paying for the land I need. I play that way to make sure that I don't have a three front war jump up on me unexpectedly, which has happened when I did things "the other way".

One thing that drives me crazy is the way the game handles any Go To command. Always asking if I really mean to start a war with an AI player (even if I have a defense pact with that player), when all I am doing is sending a Hardy Worker to that AI player's village to build a road (I guess it happens because there are mob units there). A Hardy Worker/Hardy Pioneer isn't a combat unit. In vanilla it happens a lot and I think that it is another cheap tactic to lure a player to his misfortune. Look at the wording of that pop-up. Yes blah-blah-blah, No blah-blah-blah. Unless the player REALLY means to start a war, the logic of the options is reverse to the player's original intention, and the bastards at Firaxis knew that.

They coded for war and revolution, not capitalism and diplomacy. I think the AI in vanilla reflects that.

I suspect that the AI also can spy on the human player's city, knowing how many horses and guns he has at all times. I believe this because when I have played without building up guns or horses, the AI players don't make musket units or dragoons. But the minute I start my build up, the AI players start building up canons, musketmen and dragoons too.

It makes me wonder if they build up a fleet of ships on the Europe screen full of silver. I've done that before. Had the Europe Screen full of galleons loaded with silver waiting to buy my war material right before I declared independence. I haven't been able to do that in M:C. M:C is a challenge of another sort. I'm having to use a completely different logic, specialized cities. The population cap is going to be a bigger problem for human players than it is for the AI, but the fact that TERRAIN_MARSH doesn't produce sugar in M:C has left the AI at a disadvantage when it comes to placing villages in the pregame.

Historically, in Europe, marsh areas were a source of peat and iron ore and used for sheep/cattle grazing, how this could be translating into game terms, I don't know. Making marsh plots +1 iron might do something to ease the stagnation of AI players cursed with the bad luck of having nothing but marsh to work with, but I don't think building farms/animal improvements in a marsh makes any more sense than building a privy with a glass door. I think the marsh terrain is in Civ4Col because of the need for a specific kind of terrain to grow a sugar yield. There's no sugar in M:C, so the marsh terrain becomes a sort of second desert. So, I think before the AI is put up on jacks, the marsh terrain needs to be re-examined and maybe replaced by something like Peat Bog or Salt Marsh with some manner of appropriate yield to make it useful to human and AI players, even if it is nothing more than thatching reeds or crayfish.

EDIT (Meant to write this but pushed the wrong button): For the most part, I think Cotton has no place in M:C. Flax/Linen and Wool were the fabrics of the day, cotton came from far far away and cost almost as much as silk. So if there was a Flax Bonus in the marsh, that would make much more sense than there being cotton farms in Europe.

 

[drjest2000]

You forgot the common cold. That one turned deadly for people who had never been exposed to it before. Also Europe was hit hard by diseases from Asia several times. The black death might have been from China.

True. And let us not forget influenza, which starts each new version in geese and pigs in central China. But in the main, I was speaking of the impact of European diseases on the Native Americans.

And the Americas had some nasty diseases for which the Europeans had no immunity. Largely these are lost to us now because the science of the time wasn't very good. Generally they fall into the generic category of "tropical and hemorrhagic fevers".

Many of them probably originated in Africa and were most likely transmitted to the Americas by the slave trade.

Quite a number of the classics were lost because they were conquered by Muslims in the first place. However there is another twist to the story. The Ottoman empire conquered Greece and a lot of the locals fled into Italy. This created a surplus of workforce, which in turn made labor cheap. The Greek craftsmen came up with the idea that they could replicate ancient Greek architecture and some wealthy men decided to try that. The important part here is that it happened in Venice, which at that time was the fashion hotspot. All over Europe people realized the fancy people of Venice started to recreate ancient Greek building styles and art and the Renaissance was born. When the classics were rediscovered, it was into a world which had just started to hunger for anything related to ancient Greece. Perfect foundation for interest in whatever manuscript they could find in the library.

Also true. But even before the fall of Constantinople and Greece, the Arabs had access to the classics in the libraries of Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo, and were pursuing science far in advance of that known in Europe. The Renaissance borrowed much from the Muslim golden age of science.

 

[drjest2000]

How about: loading or unloading cost one move unless there is a crane in town. That would make them interesting to use for trading ports. We could argue that horses wouldn't use the crane, but I would vote for simplifying the code to ignore such logic.

I'm OK with that idea too.

Tried the bat file? It actually accesses git using https to avoid such a problem.

Not yet. I am distracted by herds of polar bears at the moment.

Personally I would prefer using the modern names. We know whose and where they are. Using old ones can create interesting problems like having Eoforwic present and then the vikings build a town called Jorvik. All of a sudden two names for York appears at the same time. Maybe not really an issue as the game doesn't have an issue with it and honestly most players will never notice that Eoforwic and Jorvik is the same place.

One interesting note about Jorvik is that half of the word is the same as in viking. Most people split it vi-king (we are kings or whatever meaning you could put into that), but instead they are vik-ing. "ing" mean "people of" and "vik" mean bay. Viking mean "people living in bays". Norwegian people only lived at the bays while the rest of Norway was populated by a totally different people and presumably they had no problem with this division. Denmark was also mostly islands and bays at the time. The ice age compressed Denmark and like a compressed sponge the land raises when the pressure is gone (even today) also it was hotter back then than today and the sea level was higher. Those two combined meant you could go almost everywhere in Denmark by boat. In other words calling the Danes "the people living in bays" would also be fitting. Not sure about Sweden, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had a division of the land like in Norway.

Not sure who came up with the name viking. Vik is Norse. -ing is used in English city names, though Danelaw left more than 3000 Norse placenames, which are still used today. The vikings referred to themselves as "men of the north". Those people still do, but time changed the name to Norwegians. The people living further down referred to themselves as Danes. Not sure about the vikings of the east.

I don't know the word Jor and because of that I have no idea which kind of bay York was meant to be.

Personally I have an issue with the name Canute. The vikings called him Knútr. Scandinavia calls him Knud. The Germans called him Knut. The English call him Cnut, though for some reason Canute is used more often. I don't really have a problem with the different spelling, but Canute is a seriously different word and I don't know the origin of that word. I have to admit it took me quite a while before I realized who Canute actually is. At first I was "a new viking king I never heard of. Wow, I though I kind of know those guys". Turned out I knew him under a different name
Cnut and Alfred shares the name "the great". The main difference is that Cnut was called that by his people while he lived while Alfred was named that by the Victorians, who noticed England never had a king referred to as "the great".

The vikings had a tradition to name after grandparents and giving lastname after the father (common practice until the 19th century and is still used in Iceland and possible other places like the Faeroes Islands), which naturally lead to the risk of multiple people being named the same. This wasn't a problem to the vikings as they practiced "nicknaming" people to tell them apart. Cnut's read viking name would be Knútr Sveinnson (his father was Sweyn Forkbeard). The great is naturally a translation and the Norse name is Knútr inn ríki (looked it up on wikipedia). I'm not a norse expert, but it looks to me that it would be more like "Cnut with the kingdom" or something like that, referring to his expansion of the kingdom. Maybe I read it wrong though so I contacted one who can actually read Norse (yep I have such a contact. It's outside the gaming community though). The reply here is that my interpretation is not uncommon. However there is also a possible translation that it tells something about his mind, like Cnut the great thinker or Cnut the kind. Somehow my insights in the viking mindset makes this translation the most likely. We will never know for sure though.

Cnut's great^3 grandfather was named Cnut and Denmark had a total of 6 kings with that name within 300 years. The idea with adding numbers to kings of the same name came later. Actually I think it was used elsewhere at the time, but used later in Scandinavia after the viking age ended and foreign traditions started to move in.

I think the origin of Canute is based in the way modern English makes leading K in KN silent. The Knut became Canute to preserve the original pronunciation. (Just a guess)

As for Jorvik, that is a twisted bit of semantics. The "Kingdom of Jorvik" is what appears in many history books, even though Jorvik = York. Place names in English history are always problematic. For instance, one of the of the ridings of York was named "Holland"... I think the men from Norweg (North way, so named because it was the route to the ports in Bjarmaland) did indeed call themselves "north men" but to go a-viking was something else. It was more or less "vulture capitalism" at its best.

However it all originated, the words we have to work with in English are what we have to work with, sloppy and inaccurate as they may be.

I mean, does one use Gall-Ghàidheil or Norse-Gaels or Scoto-Norse or Hiberno-Norse or Irish–Norse or Foreign Gaels? They refereed to themselves simple as Ostmen or Austmenn ("East-men"). But historians like the sound of convoluted terms like Gall-Ghàidheil, chiefly because I think they think it makes them sound intelligent and sophisticated. And they certainly did not live in or found Dublin, they lived in a town they named Austmanna-tún, which is preserved today in modern Dublin as the neighborhood name "Oxmantown". The Austmenn incidentally named the Irish Vestmenn (West-men) -- not to be confused with people from the Vestmannaeyjar of Iceland.

But in the case of Jorvik, it's even more convoluted. Even the beadles at Wikipedia aren't quite sure how to name the Viking Kingdom of York, Northumbria, and Danish Mercia. They rather narrowly see each section of the domain as a separate thing, whereas I think King Yargle (or whatever his name was) saw it all as one thing, his new kingdom. Scandinavian York and Danelaw are English ideas. The boys from Scandinavia probably had very different ideas about what it was all called, something like "ours, not yours".

It's like "Kingdom of the Isles" or "Kingdom of Mann and the Isles" -- I seriously doubt that Sigurd Hlodvisson or the Norse called it either of those. The problem is that in a feverish fit of nationist/imperialist passions, the Anglo-centric English historians of the Victorian era wrote most of the histories guys like me have available to us, and thus we end up with Jorvik, Canute, and many other inaccurate terms for people, places, and things from history.

That nasty habit of the English (and many others) to re-write history to glorify themselves. So Knut was King of the Anglo-Scandinavian Empire, and the Anglo-Normans did this or that. When in truth Knut was a Danish King who kicked England's butt and took over the joint, and the Normans were the Normans, and for both Knut and the Normans, England was nothing more than a gold mine to pay for what they wanted to do.

Hey I just realized something really interesting while writing this. Look at this map of Reformation

Spoiler :

Vikings turned protestants while other people didn't. Germany was populated by Danes as they moved south around 300 BC (This explains the DNA issue with telling Danes and Saxons apart in the BBC documentary Blood of the vikings, though whoever made that documentary was not aware of this). Germany is a country of mixed people, but they did stay outside of the Roman empire. England converted, reverted (Bloody Mary) and then converted half, creating a unique mix. It's also just half viking Scotland remained catholic in the highlands and became Calvinistic in the lowlands. An interesting part here is that the Roman scribe Tacitus in 1st century AD in the lowlands (Aberdeen area I believe) was a tribe, which was the same tribe as Wendelfolk (not sure of spelling) in the far north western part of Denmark. They had to be the same tribe as they shared culture and language. This is interesting on so many levels and in many contexts. In this context I dare to say that the lowlands were no strangers to the way of thinking of the vikings. The eastern dots almost precisely match where the eastern vikings settled. Sure there are some dots in Poland and such which this theory can't explain, but for the most parts this matches. I find this discovery quite interesting. While I have seen people talk about later development of catholic vs protestant countries (like the Euro debt crisis hits catholic countries only) I have not seen a "guideline" line this to explain why some countries converted and some didn't.

I am pretty sure that the root cause that the Scandinavians converted to Protestants is directly linked to the so-called "Celtic Church" that was largely responsible for their conversion to Christianity. The flavor of Christianity sold them was categorically not centered in Rome. But more like that of Orthodoxy, where each Kingdom had its own independent church. That whole divine right of kings business. About 1200, the boys in Rome took a notion to take control of the whole operation. The Scandinavians didn't have a long cultural history of listening to Rome, so it was a "no-brainer" to them. I see them saying something like, "Who does this guy think he is? God made me king!" Then putting things back to "my kingdom, my rules".

 

[drjest2000]

OK - seriously on topic for a change - I think I have isolated the source of the crashes that I have been experiencing. The last ten times that the game has crashed, there have been no messages or any sign that there might be a problem, but here's the thing. Every time, it has crashed it was right after I had issued a Go To command for a Wily Trader functioning as a Peddler. I mean every time.

I can always restart the game from the last auto-save and there is nothing in the logs that indicate a problem or error occurred. The game simply black screens and I get a Windows System pop-up saying that there was a problem with Civilization.exe -- It offer the debug option, but I am not running a debug install of XP, so the files that it creates are largely useless, even to the guys at Microsoft.

I had the JAnimals turned off and the map was not huge or anything. So I know it wasn't a animal taking over a city. I'm fairly sure it's a memory error of some kind because I'm on a multi-core 32-bit system. So it is unlikely to be replicated on a 64-bit system.

Anyway, I'm attaching the logs and two saves. But let me repeat, I don't think that it is a bug in the code but a system limit violation because I'm on a 32-bit system.

 

[drjest2000]

New question (also on topic): Are the Wily Traders supposed to be set in the XML to learn new trades without first losing their specialization? they're set in CIV4UnitInfos.xml as <iNativeLearnTime>3</iNativeLearnTime>. should this be changed to <iNativeLearnTime>-1</iNativeLearnTime>?

Second on topic question: What are the benefits of stone roads? They don't seem to decrease the movement cost and once built, I see units starting to avoid them where they did not avoid the dirt roads.

 

[Kailric]

@Nightinggale & drjest200

What are you guys history professors? I happen to love history so I am enjoying the read, keep it up

How about: loading or unloading cost one move unless there is a crane in town. That would make them interesting to use for trading ports. We could argue that horses wouldn't use the crane, but I would vote for simplifying the code to ignore such logic.

I am going to ask again for M:C to have it's own forum so we can keep better track of ideas like this as it's been a month now. But this is one of those cool ideas to make note of.

Yeah, making a fun and playable challenge with flexibility to try out a wide variety of possible alternate histories definitely needs to trump simply re-enacting circumstances as they happened. It'll definitely be good to have natives who aren't an automatic pushover but at least have potential to be an actual competitor..

Well, one thing about M:C is your are essentially playing the "natives". Or you could say the Romans where the "natives". Either way, what I would like to see is each Civ being "playable" and depending on which Civ you play there would be different objectives and different play styles.

But I'm kind of unsure of whether the AI knows how to use it? Spices and LF are kind of complicated to obtain, and the vanilla AI already does terribly with transport and production of existing yields. Are there any thoughts of how vanilla AI could be further improved, or alternately allow for at least a certain degree of "cheating" at higher levels of Handicapinfos game difficulty when the AI runs into limits of hard-to-get yields?

The AI already gets a handicap to acquire spice so they do accumulate some. And I have lots of ideas forming on how to improve the idea. At the moment the AI can sometimes win it's Conquest but they still lose quite often. That being said I've saved games before to see I could win even if the AI lost and I was able to in a matter of 30 turns. So, yeah the AI needs vast improvements and it's top on my list of todo's.

Maybe part of that is the way I play. I always make nice to the natives, buttering them up with gifts and avoiding their land as much as I can, always paying for the land I need. I play that way to make sure that I don't have a three front war jump up on me unexpectedly, which has happened when I did things "the other way".

Heh, that's the way I play as well. Even when I am just testing out a few turns I actually hate stealing native land!! I'm like, "dude, get over it!". But the AI is so innocent

I suspect that the AI also can spy on the human player's city, knowing how many horses and guns he has at all times. I believe this because when I have played without building up guns or horses, the AI players don't make musket units or dragoons. But the minute I start my build up, the AI players start building up canons, musketmen and dragoons too.

Well, essentially you can spy on the AI as well in the form of their game score. The game score is a factor of a players assets so yeah, they can tell when you have high assets. I am not sure how much they actually know as I have never looked into it or if they actually use the game score.

It makes me wonder if they build up a fleet of ships on the Europe screen full of silver. I've done that before. Had the Europe Screen full of galleons loaded with silver waiting to buy my war material right before I declared independence.

As far as I know the AI doesn't do this. Yet again, AI usage of units is something I want to improve.

Historically, in Europe, marsh areas were a source of peat and iron ore and used for sheep/cattle grazing, how this could be translating into game terms, I don't know. Making marsh plots +1 iron might do something to ease the stagnation of AI players cursed with the bad luck of having nothing but marsh to work with, but I don't think building farms/animal improvements in a marsh makes any more sense than building a privy with a glass door. I think the marsh terrain is in Civ4Col because of the need for a specific kind of terrain to grow a sugar yield. There's no sugar in M:C, so the marsh terrain becomes a sort of second desert. So, I think before the AI is put up on jacks, the marsh terrain needs to be re-examined and maybe replaced by something like Peat Bog or Salt Marsh with some manner of appropriate yield to make it useful to human and AI players, even if it is nothing more than thatching reeds or crayfish.

Well, I read that sheep did well in marsh areas so in M:C marsh areas have a bonus to sheep. If marsh lands are known for having ore then yeah, we could add it there.

For the most part, I think Cotton has no place in M:C. Flax/Linen and Wool were the fabrics of the day, cotton came from far far away and cost almost as much as silk. So if there was a Flax Bonus in the marsh, that would make much more sense than there being cotton farms in Europe.

The book I have been reading. "Life in a Medieval City" states that during the year 1250 at the summer fair in Champagne you could find "cotton from Italy and France", so that's probably where I got the idea. I am not sure if they were growing it there or shipping it in from somewhere else. But the whole process of Cloth, Cotton, Weavers, and Cotton growers could all come from natives. Cloth was the "big business" back then with Wool being at the top tier (I don't see how as wool is itchy as heck). But top of the "avoir de poids" (goods that must be weighed) was spices that come from far far away.

 

[Kailric]

New question (also on topic): Are the Wily Traders supposed to be set in the XML to learn new trades without first losing their specialization? they're set in CIV4UnitInfos.xml as <iNativeLearnTime>3</iNativeLearnTime>. should this be changed to <iNativeLearnTime>-1</iNativeLearnTime>?

Second on topic question: What are the benefits of stone roads? They don't seem to decrease the movement cost and once built, I see units starting to avoid them where they did not avoid the dirt roads.

Well, sense Wily Traders specialization isn't manufacturing related they are different, but I believe other than acquired promotions the Wily Trader would be destroyed and rebuilt as something else so they would lose all the free promotions and attributes anyway. We can change the learn time though if it's a distraction.

Well, stone roads should be improving movement? Have you tested if this is the case? Maybe the AI do not realize this but I'll check it out.

EDIT: Ok yeah, the roads are flip flopped. Change the code below in CIV4RouteInfos.xml to make the Stone-Paved Roads work as intended. Should work with your saved games.

<RouteInfo>
      <Type>ROUTE_TRAIL</Type>
      <Description>Stone-Paved Roads</Description>
      <iValue>2</iValue>
      <iAdvancedStartCost>24</iAdvancedStartCost>
      <iAdvancedStartCostIncrease>0</iAdvancedStartCostIncrease>
      <iMovement>10</iMovement>
      <iFlatMovement>10</iFlatMovement>
      <Yields/>
      <Button>Art/Interface/Buttons/Builds/Trails.dds</Button>
    </RouteInfo>

 

[orlanth]

Well, sense Wily Traders specialization isn't manufacturing related they are different, but I believe other than acquired promotions the Wily Trader would be destroyed and rebuilt as something else so they would lose all the free promotions and attributes anyway. We can change the learn time though if it's a distraction.

After learning-from-natives Wily Trader would just become the new unittype. I don't think units lose promotions after learning-from-natives to become a different unittype, though I'm not sure about this. BTW that reminds me, what if u use AltFreePromotions to get a free promotion, does that get removed once you change professions again? If not could be a free exploit.

 

[drjest2000]

@ Kailric - In regard to marshes be a source of iron, read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_iron

It isn't a long read, it's pretty short and to the point. Even as late a American colonial times most of the iron industry was based in bog-iron. I used to live in Rhode Island and that whole area is one big glacial till with thousands of marshy bog areas, every one of them were grubbed for iron ore well into the 1800s.

As for cotton, there was a tiny part of France where it was grown and down near the heel of Italy, but those were the only places in Europe where it would grow. Until the Industrial Revolution, cotton was considered a luxury good. Cotton production didn't reach a level that validates its appearance in a European setting until some time after 1800. Prior to that it was linen and wool. Even the sails of most sea-going ships were made from linen or hemp, not cotton, until man-made fibers replaced natural. Cotton actually makes a rather poor sail, wool on the other hand does remarkably well in a salt spray environment. Linen, I am not qualified to say. But I know that medieval ropewalks made use of horse hair to make ropes, so I'm guessing that horse hair was also used to make sails. We had a horse-hair fabric upholstered sofa when I was a kid and it would itch the bejeezus out of you, worse than any wool. There is some phrase about "wearing a horse-hair shirt" that dates from Elizabethean times, so I'm guessing they knew the properties of it pretty well even back then.

The medieval period was largely a "work with what you've got" period. The various regions were remarkable for making the best use of what was available, be it horse-hair cloth or bog-iron. As for southern France, the two things that made Eleanor of Aquitaine so rich were salt and wheat. She had plenty of both in her lands and others didn't, so she and those before her were wallowing in the cash.

Me? A history professor? No, but I have had occasion to corrected more than one.

 

[Kailric]

After learning-from-natives Wily Trader would just become the new unittype. I don't think units lose promotions after learning-from-natives to become a different unittype, though I'm not sure about this. BTW that reminds me, what if u use AltFreePromotions to get a free promotion, does that get removed once you change professions again? If not could be a free exploit.

A unit only acquires a Altfreepromotions if they are wearing alternate equipment. LIke, If an Archer wears Leather Armor they get a Leather Armor free promotion.

@ Kailric - In regard to marshes be a source of iron, read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_iron

Well that settles it then, marshes make iron ore.

Well, sense Cotton is already in the game we can just move it to a specialty item. And it actually is somewhat has it has to be researched. But we are not trying to follow history exactly as it went and sense Cotton was there it makes sense to keep it. The only way now for a player to produce Cotton Cloth is to either spend the time researching it or learn it from a native. If we can add another Yield or two maybe Cotton want be noticed much We could even initiate the Inventor rules and make it so you require a Master Weaver and say 50 cotton to even be able to research it. The code to do that is already in the game I just chose not to use it for M:C.

 

[Nightinggale]

It's like "Kingdom of the Isles" or "Kingdom of Mann and the Isles" -- I seriously doubt that Sigurd Hlodvisson or the Norse called it either of those. The problem is that in a feverish fit of nationist/imperialist passions, the Anglo-centric English historians of the Victorian era wrote most of the histories guys like me have available to us, and thus we end up with Jorvik, Canute, and many other inaccurate terms for people, places, and things from history.

I don't know what they called those, but wikipedia did reveal something really interesting. Isle of Man is called Mön in Icelandic. More precise it's called Mön in the Irish Sea, most likely to tell it apart from the Danish island of the same name. Now the question is if the Icelandic name is the preserved viking name.

That nasty habit of the English (and many others) to re-write history to glorify themselves. So Knut was King of the Anglo-Scandinavian Empire, and the Anglo-Normans did this or that. When in truth Knut was a Danish King who kicked England's butt and took over the joint, and the Normans were the Normans, and for both Knut and the Normans, England was nothing more than a gold mine to pay for what they wanted to do.

I fully agree with the first, but I question if the vikings viewed England as just a gold mine.

Try to read this:
They came from their homeland across the sea. They came suddenly and filled the beach with their countless ships. From those ships an army went into the land and attacked everywhere they went.

So I just wrote a story about viking attacks... so what? The key here is that what I actually wrote about was D-day. The landing army was the heroes as they went there to free the local population from exploitation of an enemy force. Why do we say that? Because Germany lost. The vikings were the bad guys because the church won.

Now why would the English people need to be freed? For a start who were the common Englishman? Let's start with Beowulf. Why would Anglo-Saxon glorify a story about a superhero in a story taking place in Denmark and Sweden? The story appear to have historical facts right (backed up by other sources) and is not pure fiction. They must have had some connection with the other side of the sea. Otherwise it would make no sense.
Another issue I find interesting in this context is something as puzzling as the English names for the days. So it's Thursday today. We use those names all the time without thinking about them, but we should. Now what does it mean. Thursday mean Thor's day. Why did the English name their days after the viking gods? (Saturday is an exception. That's a Roman god). The only explanation I can think of is that those gods were not unknown in England and that they were likely worshiped when Christianity arrived.

How can we tell today if the vikings attacked because the locals were denied access to their shared belief? Our source for the reason for the attacks are the writings of the monks and they certainly didn't want to admit something like that, if that is the case.

Naturally this is my personal theory and I haven't got any find to prove it, but that what my sense of it all tells me very likely could have happened. At least it adds up something, which would otherwise be odd.

Oh and I really like the monk, who first writes about how bad the vikings are that they burned the monastery. Next he almost blames the monks for the misfortune because they had behaved too much like vikings. For one thing, they had viking hair styles. (not sure why that would make vikings attack ) This reveal that the monks were not unfamiliar with the vikings prior to their first attack, which on it's own is interesting.

But in the case of Jorvik, it's even more convoluted. Even the beadles at Wikipedia aren't quite sure how to name the Viking Kingdom of York, Northumbria, and Danish Mercia. They rather narrowly see each section of the domain as a separate thing, whereas I think King Yargle (or whatever his name was) saw it all as one thing, his new kingdom. Scandinavian York and Danelaw are English ideas. The boys from Scandinavia probably had very different ideas about what it was all called, something like "ours, not yours".

A wild guess is that the vikings called it something as weird as "England", which is not much different from viking names like Vinland, Markland or Island. England would mean something like "the land with meadows" to a viking. Not a farfetched name for that place.

@Nightinggale & drjest200

What are you guys history professors? I happen to love history so I am enjoying the read, keep it up

One day I'm a great coder, the next I'm a history professor. Can I be the Indian or the sailor tomorrow please
Or maybe the cowboy

 

[drjest2000]

@ Nightinggale - the thing about the hair has to do with the way the monks of the so-called "Celtic church" did the tonsure, they shaved all the head but the front, kind of like the haircut they used to call a "pineapple"

Something like this only longer on the part that isn't shaved:

The Vikings generally tended to wear their hair something like this:

Close enough for a superstitious monk to think that there was a magic link between the Viking attack and the way the monks cut their hair.

As for English day names, those came with the pagan Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Geats. The original inhabitants of Britain, the Britons, later called the Welsh, which name means "foreign", had altogether other day names, specifically, Latin day names, because for all intents and purposes, the Britons were the Roman civilians abandoned by the Roman Army when it withdrew to the continent. As late as 550, the Welsh were the still the dominant civ on Great Britain, and their language of choice was Latin.

In fact, if you look in history books, you'll soon discover than many of the titles for nobility in most nations find their origin in Roman social and military titles. Why? Because the people in place still thought of themselves as Romans, not Welsh, or Gaul, or whatever. The new guys, let's call them barbarians for simplicity's sake, were not Christian and not Roman. But they all had a bad rash of class-envy.

The Franks were pagan, but they acculturated and started calling themselves Romani, started giving themselves Roman sounding titles. The Anglo-Saxons were no different. Pagans to a man, but once they caught the Roman bug, they went Christian and started arrogating to themselves Roman sounding titles. Woden/Odin was out and Jesus was in. But they still spoke the language they'd always spoken, so Wôdnesdæg remained Wôdnesdæg until it mush-mouthed into Wednesday which is generally pronounced as though it was spelled Weddensday or Wenzdee.

The Welsh? The original Britons? They were the guys selling Christianity and Roman ideas to the Franks and the Anglo-Saxons. It's ironic and even down right funny, that St. Patric, the patron saint of the Irish, is in all truth a Roman Briton... A Welshman... that Irish pirates kidnapped and put into slavery. I laugh darkly every March 17th over that one.

I don't remember the date, but it was a good 200 years after the Welsh had converted the pagan Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, there was an Anglo-Saxon king who had a Roman Catholic Bishop and a Welsh Abbot argue it out, from this exchange, he decided to go with the guy from Rome's version of Christianity. Why? Because the Welsh had done too good a job of convincing the Anglo-Saxons that all things Roman were shiny and golden, I guess.

So, the "English" are not the original people of England, they're basically Vikings that got there about 600 AD and went native. Later the ones who get called Vikings in history, well, they were cousins of the English or something like that. Near relatives in any case.

Also, Beowulf dates from a time when the Anglo-Saxons still knew they weren't from England and very well remembered they were from Scandinavia and Germany... And they were still pagans, worshiping Odin, Thor, and the rest of the Super Friends. One would have to guess that there was nostalgia for the old ways from time to time. Especially when all one's cousins back in the homeland are still pagan. Peer pressure or something. Come on Cynric, all the cool kids are still strangling one-eyed men and dumping them in a peat bog... you know you want to too....