[Freeciv-Dev] Re: [PATCH] Renaming cities. (PR#567)

[Gaute B Strokkenes <gs234@xxxxxxxxx>]

Greg Wooledge <wooledge@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Gaute B Strokkenes (gs234@xxxxxxxxx) wrote:
> 
> > * Don't let anyone rename a city to the same name as another.
> 
> I see two problems with this:
> 
> 1) This can be used to learn the names of enemy cities.  E.g., if
> you know that the Babylonians are in the game, you can attempt to
> rename one of your cities to "Lagash", "Nippur", "Ur", etc., and in
> this way learn how many cities the Babylonians have (assuming the
> Babs haven't taken defensive naming coutermeasures).

I think that the real problem here is that Freeciv has a "!#$"!#
annoying misfeature in that it always comes up with the same city
names, in the same order (except for the misc. city names.)  If we
scrambled things a little, this would not be a fruitful approach.  It
would also spice up things a little bit by not just repeating the same
old names...

Off course, this goes both ways: if I rename all of my cities to
`Gautestad', say, that makes it a lot harder to find and take my
capital (since if you have an embassy with me, that will tell you what
my capital is called.)  I can imagine that it would also render
various other messages less informative, though I can't remember any
offhand.

> 2) As discussed a while back, there's some feeling that having
> multiple cities of the same name is a feature.  In real life, there
> are several occurrences of cities with the same name (Athens,
> Greece; and Athens, Georgia, USA).  There's no overriding reason why
> this should be disallowed in the game.

Well, IIRC there is a policy that e.g. different nation rulesets can't
contain the same names.  I think it would only lead to potential
confusion and cock-up on part of either Freeciv or the user.

-- 
Big Gaute (not to be confused with LG)
I am a jelly donut.  I am a jelly donut.