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

[Erik Sigra <freeciv@xxxxxxx>]

Gaute B Strokkenes wrote:
> 
> 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...

With some brute force, using the same scrambling algorithm, it would
still be possible to detect enemy cities and perhaps make statistical
calculations of the enemy's strengt based on that.

> 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.

Well that was a tricky one I hadn't thought of :-)

The obvious solution to this would be to have a separate city namespace
for each player. That fixes both the "guess enemy city names" exploit
and the "all my cities are called Gautestad" exploit.

If you have a city called "Göteborg" and I play the Swedes a and you
conquer my "Göteborg" it could be prefixed with "Swedish" and become
your "Swedish Göteborg" (unless you rename it). If that wouldn't make it
unique eiter, the program should just add a number or something to make
it unique.

> > 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.

Could you supply an URL to that so called policy?