[freeciv-data] Re: freedata

[Niels Weber <nath@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi!

Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:

> On Fri, 5 Jan 2001, Reinier Post wrote:

>> It is intended to explicitly nations such as 'Fantasy Netherlands'
>> including cities like include Keulen, Luik and Luxemburg.
> 
> Have those cities been part of the Netherlands at one point in
> history? Then, in my opinion, these are not fantasy Netherlands, but
> historical ones. 
> 
> In general I think it is difficult to make a distinction between
> historical and modern nations, if they exist both under the same name,
> since freeciv starts at 4000 B.C.

So why not have a netherland.historic and a netherland.modern?

>> So the idea is, if a Kurdish nation is added, but someone objects to it
>> on the ground that it is not actually a nation,
> 
> Official Turkish policy is to call them mountain-Turks.

It is at least a fantasy-nation, perhaps also historic, I don't know.

>> which is a reasonable
>> claim, 
> 
> I do not think so at all. They have a culture, a language, and, more
> important, there exist people who consider themselves as being Kurdish.
> The only thing is that there is no state labelled Kurdistan.
> Do you consider a state to be a neccessary requirement for a nation to
> exist? I do not. There are examples where states did cease to exist and
> later came to existence again, e.g. Poland. Would you say that the Polish
> nation did not exist in the 19th century?
> On the contrary, there (did) exist states, e.g. the former GDR, that were
> states, but, in my opinion, do not have an own nation.

I think, if we were in the 19th century and would be playing with modern 
nations, poland would have to be excluded.

>> we (who? the maintainers?) would not claim to be able to determine
>> 'the objective truth' on the issue, but instead we would just withdraw
>> the Kurdish nation.  (Same for Taiwan/China, etc.)  I am trying to
>> describe the policy that is being followed in practice.
> 
> I do not like it. I would rather like to include every nation that
> somebody wants to be included to be included. And I do think that it is
> possible to decide what is a nation and what is not. Take the existance of
> a language as an example.

I agree with this. We first have to lift the current limit of 63 nations 
somehow...

>> (I think it's this second case that causes problems.)
> 
> Indeed. But what would be the actual problem if the modern nation (or
> rather state) Great Britain included cities that have been parts of the
> British Empire at one time? If somebody plays as Victoria a city of Cape
> Town or New-Delhi would be historically correct. But this would not be
> true if you play as Elizabeth II.
> 
> A possible solution would be to mark cities in the ruleset to be
> allowed for one ruler and not the other. Of course the player could
> override it.

Cannons against Sparrows?

>> Yes, I know.  It is impossible to make rules that settle all possible
>> causes for dispute in advance.  The idea is to have some rough guidelines
>> that people could consult when they want to contribute nations.  It's
> 
> We should make sure that existing freeciv-nations should also conform to
> them.

Yes, I tried to accomplish this with my changes of german.ruleset.

>> This is why the rules don't mention anything of the kind.
>> 
>> This is implicit in the rules: the default ruleset includes 'Germany',
>> which must adhere to the rules 'modern' nations because its name
>> suggests present day Germany.
> 
> But with Niels' ruleset, only Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schröder would make
> sense as a ruler. How many people would like to play as them?

What about Adenauer? ;)

> If, however, somebody plays as Bismarck, it would not make sense to
> exclude Königsberg or Straßburg, but to include Wolfsburg.

Therefore I propose that we have two rulesets: one modern, one historic.

I made the changes, because all that I knew about a ruleset-policy was, 
that we don't include cities that belong to other nations nowadays.The 
second rule I know was about the order of the cities (by size and age), 
which I didn't follow, because I haven't got the perl-script that was 
made for ordering and because I was to lazy to search for every single 
city in my enceclopedia to find the founding date. (If someone sends me 
the perl-script, perhaps I'm not to lazy anymore...)

Niels