Is it possible to alter the random name generator

Think about it.. how many real life names are actual English words?

Many cities are named after real words or personal name ( whatever is your native language). Waterford, Newport, Port Arthur, Koenigberg, St Peterburg etc.

And anyway, I don't get what can be enjoyable in seeing names like Riinaaritunargh in Fallen Enchantress, sorry. Give me names like Gorgoroth, Mordenkainen, Theleb Kaarna, etc. Something with flavor (but original, as you see I used references from books and stories).

There was a thread that said you could add ten names to a created  faction for the first ten cities...  Agree on the random name generator, bleh!

"Gorgoroth, Mordenkainen, Theleb Kaarna"

These are not exactly made up of english words either   

I dunno, I actually think the random name generator is not too bad myself.  

If you want to muck around with it, checkout the WorldNameRuleset.xml in your install folder.  You can add stuff and it seems to work ok.  For example, as a test I added this entry to the file:

<ProductionRule>
   <Variable>Consonant</Variable>
   <Replace>gorg</Replace>
   <Probability>0.6</Probability>
</ProductionRule>

So as far as I can tell, this basically means that when the generator is looking for a consonant to use, it will select the string "gorg" very frequently (Probability 0.6 is extremely high).  I just started a 6 player random map with all custom factions to test this, and sure enough some of the initial cities have "gorg" in their name, for example "Lugorgiano", and "Gorgivonkaem".  One issue is that it can select these consonants/phrases more than once though, so for example one of the cities was called Gorgigorgigorg  In reality you would not use a probability as high as 0.6 and it might be ok.

I reckon if you mucked around enough (you'd probably also want to tweak the ProductionRules at the top of the file) you could get it to generate stuff more to your liking.

Alternatively as as NaytchSG stated, you could hard code the name of your first 10 cities.

Ah, I thought you were referring to faction/sovereign names not names of cities. Anyway, you could just rename your cities if you happen to dislike their default names.

Agreed, I don't like any of the basic random name generators, they generate rubbish instead of something I would pass along as a name , I'm happy to see someone trying to find a solution, if you make an extensive mod to your file it would be interesting to see it.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

I actually wrote a script to do this back in Elemental. It was based on the names from Dwarf Fortress, given with permission.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/32649007/CoreNameRuleset2.rar

Can you make the button for the sovereign's first city sat "Strike the earth!" instead of Settle?

Edit: Nevermind, I took a look at the code. Probably exactly what OP will want. Straight up English random names and mumbo-jumbo Dwarven names can both be generated.

Edit 2: Coping with the default name generator. Typically I delete part of the name or move/add some vowels until the name is moderately pronounceable. Otherwise remembering city names is just uuuuugh "Oh right. Ikiguakkabajewutha was supposed to be the fortress. Silly me."

For modding purposes, I'd either like to be able to provide a list of names or a list of half names that are randomly combined (shadow-, blood-, dark-, bright-, misty-, and -dale, -falls, -creek, -woods, etc).

gs

If I remember correctly, Alpha Centauri had a fixed list of about 100 names for each faction that were reused each game. Players could add to/edit the file easily.

That would be a lot simpler solution than a random name generator.

Entirely possible, check out my example above

I think it was only 25 land cities, and 10 water cities... Details, I know .

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Thanks Heavenfall, I'll test your file.

You can't always get rid of random names by the way: if you create custom factions, their empire will draw upon the RNG.

You can with some notepad action go into your documents and write up the first x city names, as far as I recall.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

The suggestion to make up your own city names works great. It took a little research to track down how (did I miss a working link above?), so I thought I'd share what I found out.

As directed, I edited one of my custom race files located in C:\Users\Bill\Documents\My Games\FallenEnchantress\Race. The next line after <Race Display Name>... I added:

<Capital>Daisy</Capital>
<City>Appleby</City>
<City>Bilson</City>
<City>Clarkson</City>
<City>Delany</City>
<City>Emily</City>
<City>Fey</City>
<City>Gomez</City>
<City>Holmes</City>
<City>Idina</City>

The exact line where I inserted this isn't important, but it worked where I put it. I included two tabs in front of each line so they would line up, but the tabs are strictly cosmetic.

I named my Capital after my dog* Daisy, and the other city names were the first or last name of actresses and singers. What I found useful is starting with my second city, I alphabetized the list. This helps me keep the cities straight when they hit level 2 (i.e., "oh yeah, I wanted my third city to be a fortress").

Question:  The posts above mentioned you can prename your first ten cities. Is that hard coded or could you actually put more on the list?

*This is the same "perfect" dog I mentioned in one of my previous posts!

I can't get FE to use a modded CoreNameRuleset.xml.  I had this working in Elemental, but no luck here.  Any ideas?

But I like the random names.

Does that make me weird?

Or is it just another symptom?

That makes you weird
(When I read it it seems so harshly said from my side, its a joke.)

The random names in elemental are too odd for me anyhow, too many "ogomonlodaf" names or whatever... That said, I do like when random names are generated, they just need to sound less like hammering the keyboard and more like random names

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Hell yeah! Thank the gods that someone is doing something about this. The random name generation is garbage. Hope you succeed.

No problem, I know when I am leaving others straight lines.

It seems I am not only weird, but vastly in the minority.  Not the first time for either situation...

Well if we were all the same, the world would be no fun

~ K