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

[Erik Sigra <freeciv@xxxxxxx>]

Erik Sigra wrote:
> 
> 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.

A real asshole could modify a client to submit random city names such as
"F02rR8wI9öR5ToE2KeG3", "F02rR8wI9öR5TOE2KeG3" and so on, to confuse the
enemies as much as possible. Then he could make the client use normal
and nice aliases locally to make playing as easy as possible for him.
(Of course he would maximize the effect by making the length of thoose
confuse-strings as long as possible.)

But on the other hand, there might not be enough cryptography experts
playing Freeciv for this to become a big problem.

Just my .02 F02rR8wI9öR5ToE2keG3.

Erik Sigra