There are 2 hard problems in comp. science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors

WildWeazel

WildWeazel

Carthago Creanda Est
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Just for fun and to get this out of my head.

It's never too early to name a thing. Naming something makes it more real, and clarifies discussion about it. It's also fun, and deceptively hard.

There a few names to be considered here: the name of this forum/team, the title of the game, and the internal codename (C7 is suitable for the latter IMO).

May I present, an increasingly absurd compendium of candidate names:

  • 4X7C (slightly more unique than C7)
  • Project 312 (Roman numerals CIV * III)
  • Project Bender ("We'll make our own Civ!")
  • Three More Turns
  • CivFree (sounds like "Civ Three" and totally unrelated to FreeCiv)
  • Civilibre (as in free/libre software)
  • CivPi (3.14, a marginal numeric improvement)
  • Civ3.50 (pronounced "tree fiddy" as per the Loch Ness Monster)
  • Civ III-2 (Final Fantasy did it)
  • Threedux
  • Threemake
  • Threepeat
  • Reconquista (literally Re-Conquest)
  • YUMBO!

Please discuss.


Fun fact: this is the longest thread title allowed by the forum
 
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*ponders whether WildWeazel saw my commit message in a branch that mentioned how I added off by one errors to the repo. If so, that was fast!*

You are probably right that as long as Civ is an active trademark, it wouldn't be brilliant to use it in the name (that's confirmed in newer versions of Civ? Civ III Complete's legalese at the bottom only says Sid Meier's Civilization III Complete is trademarked, but I feel like I've seen that in newer iterations). Maybe FreeCiv predates Civ being trademarked, so they're grandfathered in.

(Update: Vanilla Civ mentions Civ being trademarked. Odd that Complete doesn't)

The math part of my brain likes Project 312. Despite the above, most of the Civ ones are appealing too. Probably wouldn't go for CivLibre since in my estimation the average English speaker who doesn't also speak French or at least Spanish doesn't know what "Libre" means, outside perhaps of the context of a Cuba Libre. And even then, for "what's Cuba free of?" they may well guess free of Communism, or perhaps free of the pre-Communist corruption. Wikipedia tells me it actually means free of the Spanish, and since we'll have the Spanish...

(Which yes, means I think Stallman and the FSF got the marketing wrong for libre software. I grok why they wanted to distinguish from "free as in beer", but trying to use a foreign word for a new concept you're trying to sell can be uber difficult)

4X7C is just a bit complex for my tastes, given I still struggle to remember the seven C's. Explore Expand Extreme Exterminate Civ Creation & Customization Community Civ3 Conquests Clone is just a really long expanded name. Although I think I got the 7 C's and forgot an X this time.

Project Bender seems kind of appropriate if you've watched Futurama, which alas, I haven't. But if we continue to work in manic spurts with gaps in between, it could be appropriate in that sense, too.

I think I like Threemake the best of the Three ones. Probably better for a forum name than the game title though. Project Bender might also work better as a forum name than game name. So might Project 312 for that matter. Actually, all of the non-Civ ones seem to be better for forum names. Reconquista! could work as a project name, but would imply much more of a Spanish history focus than we'll actually have, at least unless we add some scenarios along that line.

CivPi might be my favorite Civ one. It's a classic undersell, in that we only aim to be a slight improvement, yet it also is accurate in a way that we want it to be mostly the same, but still better. Civ III-2 is definitely my least favorite Civ one.
 
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CivPi grabbed me the hardest, but yeah I think having "Civ" in the name is potentially problematic.

The counterargument to that I guess is that FreeCiv still exists. And that it's going to be hard enough to get people to use C7, and having a name that associates it with Civ3 would at least help people understand what it's about.

I'm HORRIBLE with making names. I hate all my names, especially Puppeteer. They all sound good at first, but later they're always dumb. I haven't gotten to the point of thinking JimOfLeisure is dumb yet, but that will probably come eventually, or maybe I finally found a keeper. It's a fairly recent name choice.

There is also an open question (to me) as to whether this is just an "improved Civ3" that otherwise behaves exactly the same, or a vastly expanded new game that can act just like Civ3 but with less limits. That may or may not impact the naming.
 
I thought Puppeteer was a good forum name! Whether it means you have a background in theater, or just that you're metaphorically the puppeteer of the units in your Civ games, I don't know, but it's distinctive, easy to remember, and has a plausible reason behind it.

I consider myself bad at names too, at least names that aren't variable names. Though I've found Quintillus to be a satisfactory long-term forum name. At least by choosing an obscure Roman emperor, I didn't wind up choosing someone more famous but whom I later learned was kind of not great. Y'know, like I've I'd chosen Sulla or Cinna or someone like that.
 
Clash of Cultures
 
Some title ideas for the game:

From a Tribe to a Nation
Global Hegemony
The World at your feet
Conquest or...only Hegemony?
History of a people of humanity
Irresistible ascension


Hoping that the translation is correct from French...
 
WildWeazel said:
In all seriousness, I don't know how FreeCiv gets away with it but with Civ being an active trademark and this being a blatant copy of the product, we should probably avoid any form of "Civ" in the official name.
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15 U.S. Code § 1114 - Remedies; infringement -
(1) Any person who shall, without the consent of the registrant—
(a) use in commerce any reproduction, counterfeit, copy, or imitation of a registered mark in connection with the sale, offering for sale, distribution, or advertising of any goods or services with which such use is likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive.

Attendant Supreme Court decision: "[The plaintiff = "trademark owner"] has the burden of showing that its fair use did not create any likelihood of confusion with [its own trademark.]"

-------------------------

... Which I think addresses FreeCiv and ... Who knows (yet!) what else :D
 
(Copying content from the "Crowdsourcing!" thread that belongs here)

Ozymandias said:
Item (1) is, simply, a name for the project. I think will all know how much aggressive, and successful, litigation there has been against games simply using the word Civilization in a game’s title. Accordingly, let’s - just for the moment - go with, From Stone Age To Space Age (“From S2S.”)
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Kyriakos said:
I like Clash of Cultures. If we are going to have a set starting group, an imho good name would be x (number of those cultures) Cultures. So if the starting group is 30, it'd be Thirty Cultures.
I'd go for 10 starting cultures; I even have named my commercial city gfx (they are available for civ mods and I will allow their use for this game too ;) ) "Ten Cultures".

Another name could be "World Cultures".
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WildWeazel said:
Unfortunately Clash of Cultures is a popular historical 4X board game. It's really hard to think of something generic enough to suggest "all of human history" that isn't already taken.
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Right now I'm liking Ozymandias's "From Stone Age to Space Age". It indicates the history and scope of it. The one downside is that, initially, we're going to be stuck in the Stone Age.

From a Tribe to a Nation is somewhat along the same lines.

Whereas I thought, Clash of Cultures over-emphasized the military aspect, I almost feel World Cultures does the opposite? It kind of feels like an anthropology exhibit. Trying to riff off of it... "Nations of the World"? "Thirty Nations"? Though stating the number would be just asking for it to become inaccurate when we added another. We can leave that problem to American football conferences.

@general-jcl Do you mean "Conquest or...only Hegemony?" as the name, or are you suggesting "Conquest" or "Hegemony"? I read it as the former at first, but now am not so sure... the former has that "want to read a bit more and see what it's about" aspect to it, though it does emphasize the military aspect.

I might suggest shortening History of a People of Humanity to just History of Humanity. Although it does sound a bit like it might be a Toynbee set, I think it conveys the scope well. I prefer leaving out the "A People" since it won't just be one group of people in game, and at least in English the shorter length version has a better ring to it.
 
Now you've got me brainstorming again.

"S2S" could be shortened to Stone(s) to Star(s) which is a bit cryptic but rolls off the tongue better.

In the theme of "rewriting history" there are some innocently generic phrases like "The Story Thus Far" and "Past is Prologue".

And now I'm overdue for sleep.
 
The title is important - usually, in literature, authors think of the title after the story is done :)
Imo it shouldn't be more than 3-4 words.
I like the existence of a number, which doesn't mean there are only those nations. A good example would be "Seven Kingdoms", a great RTS, which had more than 7 cultures in the second game of the series. The number is a type of synecdoche.

Hegemony is nice, but probably taken - not sure if generic enough to argue it isn't copyrighted. In that case, "Hegemonia" could work too.

Some more titles:

Primacy
Diaspora/The Great Diaspora
Si Vis Pacem (this is a bit of an allusion, phonetically, to Civ :p The start of a famous latin phrase, "if you want peace (prepare for war)" )
The phrase in English might work too: "If You Want Peace"
 
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Quintillus said:
Right now I'm liking Ozymandias's "From Stone Age to Space Age". It indicates the history and scope of it. The one downside is that, initially, we're going to be stuck in the Stone Age.

@general-jcl Do you mean "Conquest or...only Hegemony?" as the name, or are you suggesting "Conquest" or "Hegemony"? I read it as the former at first, but now am not so sure... the former has that "want to read a bit more and see what it's about" aspect to it, though it does emphasize the military aspect.

.
Click to expand...

This title refers to 2 main ways of playing:
- 'Conquest' for players who like the military expansion side of the game
-or only Hegemony" for those who like to win in a more peaceful way (culture, space, diplomacy)
 
In Terra Fantasia, the 4 Eras (mind you, TF stops in the equivalent of the mid-20th Century) -
  1. From Stone To Iron
  2. With Fire & Sword
  3. The Scientific Revolution
  4. The Triumph Of Industry
For our Beloved Project, it could be something along the lines of:
  1. From Stone To Iron
  2. With Fire & Sword
  3. The Triumphs Of Industry
  4. The Space Age
Ergo, with all bases covered :)
 
More random inspiration, on the theme of civics:
  • Statecraft - I had originally proposed this for a civilization-building Minecraft server, but the player base was too anarchist at the time to go for it...
  • Vox Populi - Latin for "the voice of the people" which is also appropriate for a community remake
  • Weight of the World (or Crown, as in "heavy is the head that wears the crown")
  • Era of Man - perhaps a bit sexist, but "Era of Humanity" sounds lame and I'm skittish of the word Mankind
Or some other politically themed term or phrase.

Also perhaps some obligue reference to Civ like Another Turn (pretty sure "one more turn" is trademarked despite my own blatant past infringements). @Puppeteer's One Turn Deserves Another is as clever as anything we've come up with.

I agree with keeping it pretty short. A one-word noun to parallel "Civilization" would be great - you know, like HUMANKIND - but all I can think of is Cultures.

Edit: more single words to play with
Nation, state, statecraft, statehood, command, authority, polity, policy, rule, culture, society, humanity, identity, voice, crown, world, history, destiny, leadership, hegemony, domination, conquest, diplomacy, progress, rise, advancement, development, achievement
 
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Loads of cool 1-word greek names:

Kratos (it means state, but also power)
Polis (city)
Megapolis (huge city)
Metropolis
Demos (citizenry)
Gaia (Earth)
Histories

I also thought of:
Powerseeker (or Power-Seeker etc)
Grand Designs

etc

There's also something like: "The Alpha and the Omega" (which doesn't have to allude to christianity either, but might be too linked to that). Or "Alpha to Omega". Would look cool abbreviated (Α Ω)
 
WildWeazel said:
@Puppeteer's One Turn Deserves Another is as clever as anything we've come up with.
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Not that I have any legal claim to that name, but I'd be fine with C7 using it. OTDA3 was a less-than-halfhearted parallel effort inspired by your original "let's make our own Civ 3" post a ways back. It's a dead project with no future.
 
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