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[Zemat]

I'm pretty sure this will be changed but anyway here are some suggestions to "fix" the way currently world gen comes up with the names for the ages.

Supposedly, ages are to be named after legendary creatures or heroes. This works pretty well for pocket worlds, but the same system seems to "break apart" when dealing with anything bigger. The reason seems to be that bigger worlds tend to be populated by a great amount of either megabeast or heroes. So the system tends to fallback to generic age names. Age of Myth when there are more megabeasts than heroes, age of legends for an equal amount of megabeasts and heroes, and age of heroes for when there are vastly more heroes than megabeasts. The other generic names (age of elves, age of civilization, etc) seem to appear only when there are no heroes nor megabeasts.

To fix this I propose a scoring system for entities in which the entity or entities which happen to have the greater score at any given moment name the age.

The selected entity could either be:

• The megabeast or hero with the greater kill-count (x100 points for each regular kill, x 1000 for each notable kill)
• The ruler of the civilization with the greater number of inhabitants (x1 points for each regular inhabitant, x10 for each notable inhabitant, x1 for each notable kill done by any inhabitant)

The system would need to have a cushion so that age changes don't trigger too often. So for example, each age will last for at least a decade even if the naming creature died a few moments after giving his name to the age. Also the naming creature would need to have at least 5% or so more points that the next one on the score list to be the age namer. If two entities happen to be above 5% of the others then the age is named after the two. If no entity or pair of entities has a great advantage over the others then the age name is called after a generic name like it currently works.

The only drawback is that this could end up being a memory hog during worldgen. But maybe not. The inhabitant and kill counts are already there. Toady would need just to add some way to pick the entity with the greater score each year.

[Deathworks]

Hi!

I like this suggestion.
Personally, I think the later ages of the world gen are lasting too long, while the initial ages (especially Myth) are extremely short. While this suggestion does not directly address that problem (unless you succeed in stretching age of heroes), it adds favorable flavoring to the entire mechanism.

Another thought would be adding an "Age of <civ>" name when a civilization gets a decisive advantage over all others - depending on the parameters and how wars develop in the future, this may even lead to changing ages. (You know, like the age of the Greeks, then the age of the Roman Empire...)

Anyhow, it sounds like a neat flavoring idea, so cheers from me for it.

Deathworks

[Granite26]

Not sure I agree that there's a problem, but if it is expanded, your method is solid and well thought out.

[Cavalcadeofcats]

Non-notable kills are probably weighted a bit too high; given the kill counts hunters rack up, they'd end up naming every age after Myth. Perhaps x10 would make more sense.

[Granite26]

ooooh, rate the ages by how much the lead entity is winning.  AKA during the upswing, it would be the silver age, during the peak, it would be the golden age, and during the fall it would be the twilight age.

Alternately, use the 5% lead to be named suggestion, but a 10% lead is enough to create a special 'Silver Age', a 20% lead creates the 'golden age', and a 30% creates the 'Platinum age'.

Implimentation details may very

[Zemat]

The numbers that I gave aren't absolute. Preferably, Toady should let us tweak them in the worldgen config.

And I like the idea of giving adjectives to the ages (Silver, Golden, Platinum). Although I would push it further and let Toady use his adjective library (If he uses one) and add whatever adjective seems appropriate (The Terror Age of Urist McDwarf, The Dark Age of Trogdor BurninatedNations).

Edit: giving ages adjectives that depend on how well the entity is doing (Silver, Golden, etc) could be pretty hard to do. Toady would need to evaluate how the particular creature has been doing over a long period of time and only give the name after some time has passed. Take into account that in the real world, historians name ages long after the fact. They didn't call the classical age "classical" when it was occurring.

[Granite26]

Oh, no, call the whole age Urist McImpaler during generation, and then go through afterwards to add the adjectives.