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

[Teemu Kurppa <tkurppa@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Raimar Falke wrote:
> 
> 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.
...
> > I have initially tested patch and it seems to work well.

> You should make this settable by a server variable. 

Yes, I can do that. Although I can't think very good reasons to 
allow multiple cities with same names. So I would prefer, that "unique
city names" would at least become default setting in civserver-games. 

> 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. 

I thought this, but I think this can be misused by experienced players
to gather information about other players. I.e. you play against
Americans, you intentionally try to name your cities with American
default city names. If other (often less experienced) player is using
default names, you get information, how many cities he have. 

Anyway, my main point is that there shouldn't be so many disadvantages
to players, who use default city names instead of obscure ones.  

> You may need to think about other cases
> where a city changes its owner. 

I tried to check it, and I think everytime player gets city from other
player, transition is done with transfer_city -function. Because
possible renaming is done there, it should work in all cases. 

> Although I'm not a native english
> speaker I think that it should "Game: You already have a city called
> %s".

Yes, my english is far from fluent, so any suggestions are welcome.  

One last note, I made patch because the current situation in civserver
games annoyed me, and this was _very easy_ to fix. This problem plaques
mainly these civserver-games, where players play more 
"The Abstract Game of Civilazion" instead of "The Thematic Game of
Civilization".  There's been suggestions about "New"-prefixes and such.
They require a lot more work, fix exactly same problem in "The Abstract
Game", but may add some feeling to "The Thematic Game". But in "The
Thematic Games" players doesn't usually call all their cities "2" ...

Anyway, thank you all for the input, I'll make some fixes, but I don't
think much more complicated solutions are worth of doing. 

Teemu Kurppa