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

[Erik Sigra <freeciv@xxxxxxx>]

Erik Sigra wrote:
> 
> 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

The best fix I can think of for this problem is to have a server
option that disables renaming of cities. Or a less restrictive way: If
the user wants to rename a city he can only request a new random city
name
from the server and then either accept or reject it.