[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Patch: Unique city names

[Raimar Falke <hawk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Nov 22, 2001 at 01:20:25PM +0200, Teemu Kurppa wrote:
> The following small patch prevents naming two cities of one player with
> same name. 
> 
> In online games one common tactic among players is to rename all
> their cities to same name, usually something short, simple but
> obscure like "@" or "2". This serves mainly one purpose: other
> players cannot know where their capitol is located. Usually this
> information is available in Intelligence Report, when you have
> established embassy with other player. But as all cities have same
> name, it doesn't help to know that capitol is called "2"... However,
> this information is essential or important to many strategies,
> because capitol plays quite big part in many of them (which becomes
> very clear from new "Art of Freeciv" tutorial) (civil war, city
> bribing, etc.)
> 
> The following patch prevents player from naming or renaming city to
> name that is already in use by that particular player. If player
> captures or by some other means gets city and its name conflicts
> with another player's city, city is automatically renamed to new
> name suggested by city_name_suggestion.  city_name_suggestion seems
> to give globally unique names, so there should be no problems with
> this. So one player cannot have two cities with same name, but two
> different players can. This is enough to guarantee that capitol can
> be figured out from Intelligence Report.
>  
> I have initially tested patch and it seems to work well. 

You should make this settable by a server variable. You may think
about disallowing city names on a global base. E.g. that there is only
one city called "Paris" and if this city is build by the Americans it
can't be build by the French. You may need to think about other cases
where a city changes its owner. Although I'm not a native english
speaker I think that it should "Game: You already have a city called
%s".

        Raimar

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