[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Nations policy

["Moses Lei" <trumpkin@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello... new to the list, but I felt like I should comment on the nation
policy...

> Completely wrong names are :
> Israeli    -> Jews
I don't think so... If I remember correctly the *tribal* name is Israel =
Israelites, not Israelis. Jews is based on the location ("Judaea") which
wouldn't really qualify as a tribal name, unless you're considering the
tribe of Judah (which is the name by which the southern two tribes of Israel
were called after the split of Solomon's kingdom-- see the bible 2 kings aka
4 samuel). Israeli would be correct, I guess, for the modern nations set;
Israelites for the ancient.

> Indian     -> Aryans
Maybe "Aryan-Dravidian"? Aryans were actually Indo-europeans that took over
and intermarried with the locals (Dravidians).

Also, if we go by tribe names, "Han" would probably be more appropriate than
"Chinese," although it would probably get a lot of people confused. I say
stick with Chinese for modern and "Han" for ancient. Even determining the
tribal roots of a nation is hard, especially since powerful civilizations
tended to absorb the people they conquered.

> Names I am not sure :
> American
We should probably leave this, even though it doesn't really fit into civ,
since so many of us consider ourselves Americans.

For translation of leader/nation names, I think that they should be
translated, *but* that for client-server purposes, all names should remain
in the language of the server; e.g. a norwegian client connecting to an
english server would have to play the "English," (instead of whatever the
name is in Norwegian), and the default names would include "Richard
Lionheart" in English, although the client could, of course, change the name
to "Rikard Løvehjerte" if so wishes. This way, proper names would not be
translated per se.

Also I agree that we should have a custom race option, although I'm not sure
how we could effectively implement that at the moment.

I think splitting nations.ruleset into three epochs is good, and I think the
default should be "ancient," since the game supposedly starts in whatever BC
:-)

Comments welcome & appreciated.

Moses