[freeciv-data] Re: Cities in rulesets

[Thanasis Kinias <tkinias@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

scripsit Miguel Farah:
 
> To a Spaniard, yes. To a mexican, the city was freed from its evil
> oppressors, only to be taken by OTHER oppressors. To an american, it was
> taken off its miserable existence and brought into progress. }:->

(I chuckle because I'm writing this from what a (Anglo) Political
Science prof I had calls "U.S.-occupied Northern Mexico".)

> Then again, this presents a whole new set of problems: a city is lost to
> rebellion based on its happiness, not on its name - if I have a
> rebellion, and Los Angeles is happy and, say, Tarragona is unhappy, I'll
> lose the second city.

How is this a problem?  In a game, it's just as likely that the
Singaporeans or the Mordors will gobble up the "liberated" Los Angeles
than the Americans anyway.

> Other problem is repeated names: there's Linares in Spain and in Chile.
> There's San Antonio and San Francisco in several Latin American
> countries. There's Santiago in at least five different countries, where
> everyone calls its local city by that name and identifies the other ones
> by a compound name (for example, Santiago de Chile is simply Santiago to
> a chilean, and he calls the argentinian one Santiago del Estero, the
> spanish one Santiago de Compostela, etc.).

That's no different from the myriad homonymous cities in the U.S.  There
are many Springfields, for example, and even multiple Kansas Cities--not
to mention the Berlins, Parises, Cairos, and Babylons.

Consider that "Berlin" on the old Civ 1 maps took up all of pre-1919
Germany, and "Paris" was larger than France.  We oughtn't worry too much
about the game being able accurately to model the "real world" map!

-- 
Thanasis Kinias
Web Developer, Information Technology
Graduate Student, Department of History
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona, U.S.A.

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