[freeciv-data] Re: Cities in rulesets

scripsit Reinier Post:
 
> Another rule of thumb that emerged is this: when a nation appears to
> be a modern state, its cities must be part of that state today.

Ouch.  One quickly gets into very, very complicated territory there.  I
certainly don't want to be the one to make the call on whether Jerusalem
gets to go in the Israeli or Philistine (==Palestinian) ruleset, or who
gets Sarajevo.

That having been said, I can appreciate the desire to avoid
duplicatation.
 
> Greece is harder.  I think most Freeciv players will associate the
> Greek nation with ancient Greece, not with the present day state;
> Constantinople or Byzantium clearly belongs to that nation.
> There is no danger of confusion with Istanbul in the Turkish ruleset.
> But it is also reasonable to apply the rules applied to Germany and
> restrict the Greek cities to those in the Greek state today.

For Greece it's especially painful; it's a reminder that most of the great
Greek cities are under enemy occupation:  Constantinople, Smyrna, even
Trebizond.  

There are many countries which will have this problem.  I just reworked
the Russian ruleset, too.  Many of the most important Russian
cities--according to the weighting formula--lie within today's Belarus
or Ukraine.  That in now way diminishes the fact that these were Russian
cities, before there was any dfferentiation into Great/Little/White
Russian.  Kiev is the prime example--it is the number one Russian city,
as it is hundreds of years older than Moscow.  The old heartland of
Russia isn't within the Federation, only the easter fortress towns which
mostly date only to the 17th or 18th centuries.

I would have been inclined to take the opposite approach:  that it doesn't
matter where the border is today.  Kiev, when it was great, was
_Russian_.  Similarly, Constantinople was Greek.  Avoiding overlap
really wouldn't be that difficult.  Simply take a world map and divide
it up among the default civilizations.  Doing that would also help to
clarify which civs really belong in the default set.  If a civ winds up
not having any cities of import, than maybe it oughtn't be included.
There's no reason not to have them as an addon, of course--but addons
might carry the caveat that duplication may occur.

As a historian, I would enjoy such a project, and it really wouldn't be
that much work.

-- 
Thanasis Kinias
Web Developer, Information Technology
Graduate Student, Department of History
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona, U.S.A.

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