[Freeciv-Dev] Re: obscuring the capital: natural city names

[Cameron Morland <cjmorlan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

La 2001-03-13, Reinier Post skribis:

> > Would it not be a good default to
> > randomize the names of cities (from among the pool for the nation)?
>
> Yes, for the AI players, who don't seem to defend their capital better
> than any other city, it would.

I made a patch this weekend that suggests "terrain-appropriate" city
names. Currently it only cares if the city is coastal or on a river (or
both), but it's a start, and will remove certainly of what order cities
were built in. More importantly, it will make city names easier to
remember, because they are terrain specific.

The patch splits the city names lists in the nations into four sections
per country: normal city names, coastal city names, river city names, and
coastal-river city names (respectively London, Southend-on-Sea, Cambridge
(bridge over the Cam river), Dartmount (mouth of the Dart river)). Then it
checks which category a tile falls into, and selects the next name.

Note that it degrades gracefully --- if a city is coastal-river, but all
the coastal-river names are taken, it will take a coastal name; if those
are all taken, it will take a normal name, and continue as before
(eventually picking from the common pool). This also means that for
countries with unmodified city lists (I only modified a few for testing),
the system still works fine.

Technically, this patch does three things. First of all, it modifies

  char *city_name_suggestion(struct player *pplayer)

to also take the co-ordinates of the city to be built as an argument. Once
the co-ordinates are known, the terrain can be examined.

The second part is to modify every instance where this function is called.
This includes when an AI builds a city, when a city comes from a hut, and
when the player builds a city. The first two were straightforward, the
last involves determining (from the packet) the id of the unit building
the city, then using the location of that unit.

The final part of the patch is to modify the ruleset-reading to also read
the additional lines.

I set up short lists of cities for the English, French, Canadian, and
American. More can be added, but really they need to be done by someone
who understands the language and can see where the city name comes from
("Ox-ford", etc). Alternatively cities that are coastal/on a river can be
used, like San Francisco, even if the name has nothing to do with it.

An extension of this would be to have a method of generating city names by
their place. Rivers could be named, then on that river would be cities
like "Stratford-on-Avon", "Avonbridge", "Avonmouth" and so on. I'm not
sure if this is a good idea, it's certainly a bit more work. What do you
think?

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