First off, huge thanks to the Triumph team for finally allowing us to set custom city names beyond just our capital in the faction creator. This is a feature I’ve wanted for a long time, and I was really excited to see it included in the Griffon update. That said, after spending some time with the beta, I’ve run into a few issues that severely limit the potential of a custom city name pool:
EDIT: Actually it would seem the latest beta update partially alleviated this! I just migrated a captured city and it did indeed take one of my custom names. Thank you, Triumph.
- City names are used in strict order, rather than randomly drawn from the pool.
This takes a lot of the flavor and surprise out of the feature. I assumed the game would pull names randomly from the custom list (or at least offer the option). Why allow up to twenty names if at most you'll have maybe seven or eight cities in a game? And that it's you're absolutely stretching it (not to mention most of those will come from conquest). A checkbox to toggle between ordered or randomized naming would go a long way here. - The in-game button to randomize city names doesn’t draw from your custom names.
This is especially frustrating since most cities in a typical game are acquired through conquest, not colonization. As it stands, you only get to use your custom names when founding a city from an outpost, which might only happen once or twice per game—certainly not twenty times. It severely limits the visibility of a feature that could otherwise add a lot of personality to a faction because you can't draw from your naming pool for conquered city (unless you remember them and enter them manually). - Custom names don’t apply to free cities of your race.
If a free city shares your race, it would be great for it to reflect your custom naming pool—this would help make your empire feel more unified and flavorful. This is especially important since AI empires playing your custom faction will never manually rename their integrated free city, further reducing the visibility of your custom city names.
EDIT: Actually it would seem the latest beta update partially alleviated this! I just migrated a captured city and it did indeed take one of my custom names. Thank you, Triumph.
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