Discussion and Announcements

[Agathon]

DBHo,

I've wanted to thank you for some time, for the tip about the excellent skins, but I've been selfishly applying them to what is (unfortunately but necessarily must remain) my older version of your mod.

I'm downloading 4.1.5 as I type, so don't think that I won't install it.

I was thinking that editing the numerous names files to standardize Greek names would be a commendable project for someone like myself. I cringe almost every time I see a name like Pefkalos or Anaksarxos or Aristidis. These spellings suggest that the compiler was slightly more comfortable in the Modern Demotic Greek idiom than in either Modern English or Ancient Attic-Ionian Greek.

The extensive doubling of names with their Modern English and Latin equivalents is another mild irritation. For example: Alexandros exists side by side with Alexander, and Demetrios with Demetrius. Philippos probably reappears in three separate forms, one of which, Philipos, is merely an error, as it occurs in neither English, Latin or Greek.

I know how pedantic this must sound, but I should recommend an "alignment" of the character-names as an improvement.

[Agathon]

Most of my experience with the older version of EGM playing with Greeks is that when I have stalemated the Julii in the great bowling alley that is Italy (that's right, the Julii start tossing large stacks of early roman legionaris early in the campaign toward the 7-10 split that is Tarentum and Croton,) the Julii, once punched in the nose by sturdy greek phalangites, will divert their aggression toward Gaul and Carthage.

Just set Pyrrhus of Epirus up near Cannae and let him solidly defeat the first Vibius Julius who shows up looking for a chance to besiege Tarantum. The "toe" and "heel" of Italy are largely defended by walls of mountains, Defend the few passes between Tarentum and Capua with fortresses and small garrisons and Pyrrhus sits astride the plains near Cannae like a spider in her web, waiting for some inexperienced Romans to enter her trap.

By all means, you should bribe Croton into your Greek alliance as early as possible, and be sure that your emissary reaches Croton before any Romans come to besiege her. Once bribed, Croton gives some good quality troops.

As soon as the Romans lose a significant stack in combat in the South, they'll reverse their tide and turn toward rebel Genua and Carthaginian Aleria. As I've observed, an attack on Genua usually brings the Romans into war with Gaul.

Next time I post, I may mention some observations concerning the Thracian AI and its evident aims.

[Agathon]

I just checked, and discovered that I'm running XGM version 3.6.13 with RTW without BI patched to version 1.5.

Before installing the latest version, I've backed up my old XGM 3.6.13 to mt second hard drive, hoping to save my little unit mods and other tweaks for future reference.

With that in mind, DBHo, I was wondering if you would recommend installing BI when I reinstall my RTW Gold. In short, do you think the XGM in its current form will work best with RTW 1.5 or RTW-BI 1.6?

As a further consideration, do you think that having XGM with BI 1.6 would be more of a help or a hindrance to the kind of continuing modification that I have undertaken in the past?

As to my pedantic little rant about standardizing names files:

You say Alexander. I say Alexandros.
You say Ptolemeus, and I say Ptolemaios.
Alexander - Alexandros -
Ptolemeus - Ptolemaios -
Let's call the whole thing off.

As for editing the names lists, I may have neglected to mention that I have already tried. In fact, I've attacked this thing about three different times, perhaps more than that, if one considers that I was first attracted to the task by the unusually large number of pre-hellenic coptic names attached to the Ptolemaic faction characters. So I began by editing the names of the royal family as found in desc.strat., and, after a whole Saturday's work and a few CD's, I actually was able to get a working version to load with Ptanthotep (or whatever) renamed to Ptolemaios and his heir to Dionysios.

I was able with the Ptolemies to rename all the people in desc.strat from the wives and royal princesses down to the lowliest garrison captains, the Ptolemaic admiral, the diplomat and the spy. However, when I went on to replace Egyptian names *not* used in desc.strat with Greek names, I started to experience CD's again. So my repsonse was to review, overhaul and edit all the names for all the greek factions, and what began as a "day" project, I soon realised, could consume whole weeks with explorer and as many as six or more windows opened on my desktop at a time (not counting the search and replace windows attached to each opened file.)

My approach to the task from the "editing" standpoint was this:

[1] To spell consistantly existing faction names in accordance with modern phonetic and orthographic standards currently employed in the translation of ancient Greek texts. For example:

faction: greek_cities

characters
Acaeus Akaios
Acamus Akamos
Acestes Akestes
Aclepiades Aklepiades
Acrisias Akrisias
Acroneos Akroneos
Adeimanthos Adeimanthos (unchanged)
Admetos Admetos (unchanged)
Adrastos Adrastos (unchanged)
Adymos Adymos (unchanged)
Aegicoros Aigikoros

So far, the only things that have changed, are that c's have become k's and that the Latin dipthong ae has been hellenized to ai. The significant change to the RTW list is that latinized greek names like Acaeus are no longer present in the revision standing alongside non-latinized names like Admetos.

[2] To replace names duplicated and triplicated in the lists with different (and I might just as well add improbable) spellings with new names whenever and wherever duplicates deviated most from the actual Greek. For example:

Philip Philippias
Philipos Philippides
Philippos Philippos (unchanged)

It's worth noting from the example that RTW's "Philip" is the Modern English form of the Greek "Philippos," and that it is very improbable that RTW's rendering "Philipos" could have been derived from the Greek "Hippos" (horse). In editing, I merely chose to replace what I reasoned to be inconsistant duplicate names with actual alternate derivative forms of Philippos that one could encounter in Greek Literature. (For Philippides of Athens, see Herodotus vi. 105, 106.)

[3] To eradicate silly or baseless names from the lists. If an example is needed, try:

faction: thrace

characters

Mukaboris
Mukos
Mukazeis
Mukakenthos
Mukapaibes
Mukaporis
Mukazenis

It's the entire "M" section for Thrace, a group of frequently recurring names that I privately call the "Mukos-Membrane brothers." My index for Thukydides' History of the Peloponnesian War covers this same ground alphabetically with "Motya, Munichia, and Mykale." The index for Herodotos' Inquiries shows "Mossynoikians, Munychia, Musaios, and Mykale" for the same sequence in the alphabet. Aside from the alternate spellings for the name of a one-goat-town in Attika, the only significant thing to take from these index citings is the apparent absence of "Mukos" derived names. Etymologically, "Mykos" derived names would have proved themselves a more probable option. Take for example Thukydides' statement at 1. 10: "Mykenai certainly was a small place ..." Mycenaean Greek civilization is not quite the same as Mucousaean Membrane civilization, is it?
...

These were the three things about the names (as they are) that I most wanted to change. On the whole, I think it is important to stress that I was not and am not interested in replacing the old names with new ones of my own choosing. Rather, I would like most to simply standardize and, in so doing, hellenize the existing names.

Bearing in mind objectively that standardization and hellenization of the greek names is primarilly in its results a subjective and ascetic pursuit that remains, as it were, in the eyes of the beholder, it remains my opinion that a uniquely "Greek" mod designed for the enhancement of play for those who enjoy playing with "Greek" factions should use standardized hellenic names for the characters in those factions.

[DimeBagHo]

Agathon: Install BI 1.6 if you have it (just make sure it really is 1.6 because some versions of the Gold Edition don't install the correct version of the patch). You will get a bunch of added features, like swimming units, shield_wall formation, city lighting on the battle map, and so on.

As for the names, I can give you some advice about the easy way to do what you want to do. There are three files which control names:

data/descr_names.txt (tells the game which names belong to which factions)
data/descr_names_lookup.txt (tells the game what all the internal names are)
data/text/names.txt (tells the game how each internal name should be displayed to the player)

In data/text/names.txt you will see lines that look like this:

{Amulius}			Amulius

The name in the {} curly brackets is the internal name. The name that follows is the displayed name. If you just want to change the way that names appear to the player, all you need to do is change the displayed names. You won't need to change anything else like the names in descr_strat.txt, and as long as you don't remove any lines, or change any of the internal names, you don't need to worry about causing CTDs.

If you feel the urge to fix up the names in the XGM version of the file I would be happy to include the results in the mod. :)

[Agathon]

Thankyou, for the prompt reply and the good info, DBHo.

I do have a BI disk, and a quick check of the readme ... shows ...

"Rome: Total War patches:

Rome: Total War does not need to be patched to install Barbarian Invasion.

Barbarian Invasion patches Rome: Total War to version 1.3. Do not install earlier patches for Rome: Total War after installing the Barabarian Invasion expansion. So doing will cause Barbarian Invasion to malfunction."

Unless this readme is dated and wrong, this seems to say that I'll be downloading and installing patch 1.6 on my own.

If I correctly understand your point on the names files, you just informed me that there's no need to edit the dictionary entries or the desc_strat. That's a relief!

I'm honoured that you would like to see the results of my work. I'll get to it A.S.A.P.

Again, many thanks.

[DimeBagHo]

Version 4.1.6 is available. The changes are mostly minor bug fixes, but I recommend upgrading if you already have 4.1.4 or 4.1.5.

[Agathon]

Just completed a beta revision of text\names.txt. I gave the Egyptians hellenized names, alhough many of these retain distictly Coptic roots (the varios Ammons and Nepthris). After playing a turn or two in a developed campaign (Greek_Cities c. 258 BC), I decided to edit Pontic names too. In the future I should look at the Pharsi-Parthian names and the Carthaginian ones too, which is why I'm calling this a "beta" revision.

{Hekhemmut} Ptolemaios
{Khnumhoptep} Charikles
{Nakhrankh} Mnesiphilos
{Ptahhotep} Peithias
{Ptahotem} Pedaritos
{Wah} Peloros

It still looks good, and I'd be happy to send you a copy of the file.