Question about roman names

Hi all,

first up i'd like to thank the EB-team for their efforts to bring us this great mod. I'm impressed by the depth of the mod. THANKS!

I have a question about the roman naming system in EB. As far as I know the roman naming practice, the son of Lucius Cornelius Scipio should bear a name like Publius Cornelius Scipio. In EB however, the son's name would be Publius Mallius (or other nomen gentile) Scipio. So the actual familiy name is lost within one generation. Is there a reason why the cognomina are inherited from father to son and not the nomina gentile?

Thanks again.
Moonfog

I believe it's a hardcoded issue with how RTW handles names of succeeding generations.

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Originally Posted by blacksnail

I believe it's a hardcoded issue with how RTW handles names of succeeding generations.

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I don't think this is a hardcoded issue. For RTR we made a working cognomen mod. Roman caracters got three names of which the nomen gentile and the cognomen were given from father to son.

Well, there's one thing I'd like to ask. Is the EB team going to work on the Roman names any further? Many of the names which turn up (talking about nomen gentile and cognomina) are not correct for the timeframe of the game. Many of them indicate provincial birth, very low class origin or even names families with freed slaves as ancestors would have. Such romanized foreign names start to appear in the higher classes like generals and such only between 50 to 100 years after the games timeframe. I have to write down the names of some of my generals as I don't remember them at the moment.

One of them for example is called Diocletianus, like the later emperor, a greek name like that wouldn't appear during the Republic or early Principate. People with such a low social status or provincial birth didn't have the chance to advance to higher ranks or social status. That only happened after the Romans started to grant citizenship to other people and auxiliaries on a more regular and more widespread basis. Of course I would offer my help if the EB teams was going to work on the names.

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Originally Posted by blacksnail

I believe it's a hardcoded issue with how RTW handles names of succeeding generations.

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I believe that this can be resolved blacksnail.

I am sure that EB does it's naming system in the format: Publius Cornelius Scipio while RTR does it in the format: Publius Cornelius Scipio. The first section of the name, in red, is what the engine recognises as the character's first name. This is never passed down through a family by default. However the section in blue, what the engine recognises as the character's second name usually is. This means that in EB one of this character's children could become known as Augustus Gaius Scipio while in RTR the child could become known as Augustus Cornelius Scipio.

Good luck with understanding my complex post which even I don't understand. Cheers!

That could be worked on. It's a hell of a lot of work though honestly.

Asking for names to work only in certain time periods within the mod's time frame is something unreasonable though, but how many names do we have that are totally outside of the mod's timeframe? A few might have slipped in, but I don't think there is a large number.

this should be fixed with our new Roman ethnicities we are working on. That's all Im going to say right now though.

oh ok thank you.

@Teleklos: No I wasn't talking about specific names for each century or something like that. The change of names during the whole EB period is not that big as citizenship was very limited during this time. The big changes appear much later during the principate.

Just looked at the list in the EB files. Names I'd remove for sure are

Ammonius ,Dio ,Maesa,Mamaea, Soaemias, Caracalla, Constantinius, Elagabalus, Gaetulicus, Odaenathus, Timesitheus, Augustus, Diocles, Diocletianvs, ...they are all latinized versions of foreign names and would not appear during our period. Augustus is a title and names like Constantinius are not common as well. the names we come across in late antiquity differ a lot from the republican and I don't know, there are many like Constantinius which would be possible theoretically but don't really appear in reality. I don't want to sound picky...It's like naming your child Brunhilde nowadays, I mean you could but people would probably think you're weird.(nothing against any Brunhildes running around here)

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Originally Posted by Omanes Alexandrapolites the Idiot

I believe that this can be resolved blacksnail.

I am sure that EB does it's naming system in the format: Publius Cornelius Scipio while RTR does it in the format: Publius Cornelius Scipio. The first section of the name, in red, is what the engine recognises as the character's first name. This is never passed down through a family by default. However the section in blue, what the engine recognises as the character's second name usually is. This means that in EB one of this character's children could become known as Augustus Gaius Scipio while in RTR the child could become known as Augustus Cornelius Scipio.

Good luck with understanding my complex post which even I don't understand. Cheers!

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Months ahead of you, thats why I have Zak doing all that reasearch.

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Originally Posted by Zaknafien

this should be fixed with our new Roman ethnicities we are working on. That's all Im going to say right now though.

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Good news, Zaknafien. I'll wait and see. Thanks for the info.

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Originally Posted by Zaknafien

this should be fixed with our new Roman ethnicities we are working on. That's all Im going to say right now though.

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Oh! Oh! So tantalisingly close!

I just discovered that roman names were already an issue in the Suggestions for v0.8 thread almost one year ago. Is there a chance that the new roman ethnicities Zaknafien mentioned above will be in EB 0.81? If not, I could give it a try to regroup the roman names so that sons inherit both nomen gentile and cognomen from their father.

All name work is done in a spreadsheet to minimize any chance for errors - so editing the names text files will not do any good. Names are first of all a real pain in the rear for a mod like EB. There are thousands of them, and we usually have different internal vs. external names to make sure no problems ever occur with spaces or other characters or things like that (in internal variants). If the roman faction guys want it changed, they need to provide exactly what they want to me, and provide it in the format that I request. Then we will have to mirror those changes in descr_strat.txt characters and possibly in some script files as well if we are doing massive changes. We currently have more than a thousand variations on roman given names and more than a thousand surnames as well. All "u"s are rendered as "v" and all "J"s are rendered as "I"s - just a couple of other things for them to remember.

The new Roman ethnicities will not be in 8.1 sadly. While there is alot of information on patrician families digging up detail on plebian gentes is more difficult. Id say the research on all new ethnicities is probably about 60% complete. Once its done, the coders (Attilius and Bozos are great) will be taking over to implement in game.

I thought that the cognomen was separate so that when you got one of the special cognomina for doing something in the game (ie, Africanus), it would only replace the existing cognomen, not the nomen as well.

For instance, if you were Publius Cornelius_Scipio, and you conquered Carthage or whatever, you would become Publius Africanus. The way EB has it, Publius_Cornelius Scipio would become Publius_Cornelius Africanus. Still not accurate obviously (should be P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus), but maybe better?

What I would like to know is what is with the Cornelii fetish? :D Three out of five of the original Roman characters are Cornelii (Cnaeus Cornelius Blasius, Cnaeus [Cornelius] Scipio Asina, and Lucius Cornelius Scipio... the latter two were brothers). Did some mnai exchange hands or something? Hehehe

Yes, that actually is why we did it that way. I had forgotten the reason, but I remember that part of it.

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Originally Posted by Sheep

What I would like to know is what is with the Cornelii fetish? :D Three out of five of the original Roman characters are Cornelii (Cnaeus Cornelius Blasius, Cnaeus [Cornelius] Scipio Asina, and Lucius Cornelius Scipio... the latter two were brothers). Did some mnai exchange hands or something? Hehehe

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The Cornelii were one of the more influential gens at the time. They were generally, but I imagine that at others you'd be seeing Fabii or Aemilii.


If there's any donkey work to do with the Roman names, I'd be happy to help. I have no modding skills but I can type.

well, over 30% of all consuls in the Republic were of the gens Cornelli. They were a little bit influencial, you might say.

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well, over 30% of all consuls in the Republic were of the gens Cornelli. They were a little bit influencial, you might say.

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Oh yeah, totally. It's just that SIXTY percent of the starting characters are Cornelii and there are other heroic names floating around at the same time that maybe might be nice to give a little variety.

My number one suggestion would be Marcus Atilius Regulus, who was consul in 267 and 256, won victories in Calabria, Sicily, and Africa, and became a Roman martyr when he was captured and supposedly murdered by the Carthies in 250 after losing the Battle of Tunis. This was a pretty important family in the 3rd century also... his father Marcus was consul in 294, his son Marcus was consul in 227 and 217, and his other son Gaius was consul in 225. I think there was a brother or uncle also named Gaius who was consul in 257 and 250. Not too shabby of a resume if you ask me (not that you did). Maybe he could replace the seemingly less important Blasio (not that I know anything about Blasio)?

Just a thought, of course I know you have many more important things to deal with, and I can honestly just mod this in myself anyway.

well EB tries to as closely portray the starting position in 272 BCE. Nothing says that Regulus would be consul in 267 in your game. If the starting date was 267, then he'd probably be included.

Maybe they were consuls very near our start date or something like that. I don't remember the exact internal discussions we had, but we set up short histories of most of the men who could be considered as generals in 272 for the Romani, and had an informal poll on it I believe.

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Originally Posted by Zaknafien

well EB tries to as closely portray the starting position in 272 BCE. Nothing says that Regulus would be consul in 267 in your game. If the starting date was 267, then he'd probably be included.

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Okay well dude, Blasio wasn't consul until 270 either. I'm assuming Blasio was praetor in 272, since he has that office at the start of the game. I don't know what office Regulus had in 272, but I'd imagine he was something if he was consul just 5 years later. In fact, the consuls in 272 were Lucius Papirius Cursor and Spurius Carvilius Maximus. Where are they? I'm not truly asking that, my point is that EB didn't pick people who were consuls in 272, they just picked people who either had power at the time or would have power shortly after, so that you could build on that. Which is totally fine. Pick anyone as long as it's accurate, which it is. I'm not saying they are wrong to pick Blasio, I'm simply suggesting another option because of a personal preference.

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Originally Posted by Teleklos Archelaou

Maybe they were consuls very near our start date or something like that. I don't remember the exact internal discussions we had, but we set up short histories of most of the men who could be considered as generals in 272 for the Romani, and had an informal poll on it I believe.

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It's cool, just throwing it out there. I've already played my Romani campaign long enough to where Blasio is long dead and his adopted son has risen to become my princeps, so obviously I don't care THAT much. Like I said, if it starts to, I can just do some "quick" modding.

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Originally Posted by Sheep

My number one suggestion would be Marcus Atilius Regulus, who was consul in 267 and 256, won victories in Calabria, Sicily, and Africa, and became a Roman martyr when he was captured and supposedly murdered by the Carthies in 250 after losing the Battle of Tunis. This was a pretty important family in the 3rd century also... his father Marcus was consul in 294, his son Marcus was consul in 227 and 217, and his other son Gaius was consul in 225. I think there was a brother or uncle also named Gaius who was consul in 257 and 250. Not too shabby of a resume if you ask me (not that you did). Maybe he could replace the seemingly less important Blasio (not that I know anything about Blasio)?

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Fun fact from our internal notes:

Caius Atilius Regulus (consul in 225) commanded at Telamon. He was killed and his head presented to the Gallic king.

The Atilius issue is clearly a very important to our players. We should adopt this suggestion immediately. ;)

Love the EB mod, but I'd like to limit the number of nomina and cognomina that show up in the game. For example, if I detest the Julii and only want to see Cornelii, Fabii, Aemilii, Junii, Valerii, etc, what files to do I have to fix?

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Love the EB mod, but I'd like to limit the number of nomina and cognomina that show up in the game. For example, if I detest the Julii and only want to see Cornelii, Fabii, Aemilii, Junii, Valerii, etc, what files to do I have to fix?

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RTW\EB\Data\descr_names.txt

RTW\EB\Data\text\names.txt

Make sure any names you have changed or removed are not used by any starting characters in RTW\EB\Data\world\maps\campaign\imperial_campaign\descr_strat.txt (remember to delete map.rwm) or you WILL get an error-less CTD on campaign start.

For my own Roman campaign I made an adaptation of the RTR Cognomen mod just to get rid of the wrong naming convention currently in EB. Took only about half an hour of work, maybe a little more. The biggest problem with this system is the addition of epthets through traits, such as Africanus, Gallicus and so on as they would replace both the gens and the cognomen.

In theory, one could completely regulate character names (including first names, if you want to get technical enough) through traits, though that would require an unbelievable amount of work.

I'll be interested to see what kind of solution the EB team will be using for their next release...

Those guys have been hard at work, underneath the hood. I don't know what they did, but they did something crazy to it. Probably sacrificed some chickens or something if I know them. I don't think that problem exists anymore, but I haven't tested out a Roman game in the newer builds either.

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Originally posted by Sheep: I thought that the cognomen was separate so that when you got one of the special cognomina for doing something in the game (ie, Africanus), it would only replace the existing cognomen, not the nomen as well.

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What you're describing is the agnomen, which was added onto a name due to achievments but wasn't necessarily passed down and it didn't replace the cognomen. The cognomen usually described a physical attribute e.g. Caesar-hairy, Cicero-chickpea (what an ancestor's nose looked like) and were passed down.