Unfair naming rights???

Possible most obvious???

I hope you won't be offended when my invading army "accidentally" invades your lands and leaves all your armies in this condition. 

Send me your email and i will send you screesnshots of my "unfair victory party"...

Well on a game with a very large map and many players this would still be a problem.  Say you receive a message to recieve a free item from another player who only wrote to meet him in Dunkans Forest.  The world map might have 50 different forests... so you have to highlight each forest and view the 10+ names for each forest before finding where to pickup the item.   Even worse what if he named the location Dunkans Mark...  then you have to search every terrain or wait another entire turn as you send a message back requesting more specific directions.

Also with so many different names being stored for each location it's more work for the game as compared to each location having only one name.

   Against the AI... of course the single human player could name the locations, this conversation is about naming locations for multiplayer games.  For multiplayer disabling naming would be removing a game feature.  Naming locations only in your territory... this is a possible option the developers may consider.  The random names pulled from a database is what the default game will be doing... ideally the naming convention should use an algebra formula as compared to fixed names which provides a greater list of names with less effort.   

This is getting vastly over-complicated. Naming should be something fun and simple, not something burdened with 50 rules and 2000 lines of code to enforce them.

If you and I want to both name the same river something else, who cares? In the past that river had no name at all, and I managed to tell you where I wanted you to go just fine using things like map pings or "that river Southeast of Shadowprey Village."

Over-complexity just means more rules to learn and more chances for bugs. When its about the name of a river, why does it really matter?

/applause

  I doubt the developers will have the game doing extra work by allowing each player to uniquely name each location.  I can only imagine it storing 20+ names for each terrain section... what a cluttered mess.  Also multiple names for map locations WOULD cause confusion during multiplayer gaming especially new players. 

  Everything I've listed were answers to questions others were asking... the developers can provide an easy map naming solution for multiplayer by allowing only renaming for territory within the owners boundaries.  If the developers are interested in allowing players to rename locations outside of their boundaries then the players submit names and vote.  Not as tough as you think.

Agree on the getting over-complicated point, but naming stuff really does matter to those of us with a strong RPG streak and probably others. Even if a river has no mechanical role in the game, naming it is part of transforming a randomly generated map into an immersive game world.

You know, in meatspace, many places have multiple names.  It's not that complex.  On my German maps the capital city of Bavaria is Munchen.  On my English maps it's Munich.

If it were me, I'd store the users names locally and pass on to other players if they have X level of espionage or treaty.  XML is cheap and easy.

I might be wrong, but it seems like there is a fairly simple solution.  Let me name things and store that locally.  Then, if I tell you to meet me at "my main town", you don't see "my main town", the computer send the co-ordinates.  When you get the the message, it checks on your computer to see if you have named it something.  Then, you either see the name YOU hve given that location, or the co-ordinates.  I know that is possible, but not sure how hard it would be to program. 

My biggest worry about the idea is how critical would spelling be.  I can spell, but my typing can leave a lot to be desired LOL.

The communication via email outside the game and typed messages where gamers type the locations name is where the problem exists.   I could ask you to meet me in the Dunkins Mark from an email message and upon looking at your world map you would have to check each individual terrain location.

Unless you're planning to include a terrain name search option.   The terrain search option would need to specify the player name and terrain name... because two different players might have two different locations with the same name.

/throws 2 pennies

Speaking strictly multiplayer here...I dont really care how names are decided but I would want all players to share those names. In my mind, it will make communication waaayy easier. Not to mention, the world would seem more alive that way. Why make it more complicated by throwing map sharing & coordinates in the mix?

Just felt obliged to mention that the coming soon blurb for Elemental on Impulse caps the multiplayer crew at 8. That could still be a fair amount of clutter on a shared map or a fair number of maps to share, but it is a long way from 20 or more.

I'm still only flirting with the idea of putting time into multiplayer (at least post-RTM), but it would make the game seem *less alive* to me if there were some artificial Gods-Approved Map. Having the game interface be able to reflect something like the Malvinas/Falklands argument would make it *more alive* to me.

And some of the recent posts make me suspect that it doesn't need to be 'complicated' from a player usability POV. Zubaz has a good point--markup languages like XML are *designed* to do things like treat a place name as a modifier for a set of coordinates, and choose among a set of modifiiers in response to a CSS.