[mainline] Renaming Khalifate for Wesnoth-ian identity

[mintleaf]

I have a couple of words to say why I do not like idea of Southerners positioned as Nomads.
First of all, we have orcs for this. Just look to the race description of the orcs. The orcs is barbaric nation that periodically made raids on civilized settled nations living in cities.
From the other side, I see a basis of Southerners economy in cattle breeding. Well, if Southerners live in steppe lands, it would be logical. They have huge herds of cattle wandering from place to place because of the deficit of lands covered with grass. There must be some grass because nothing can live in absolute desert (you must eat something). But this does not mean that all southerners are nomads. It would be the same to name Wesnothian Empire "Farmers" just because their economy based on the agriculture. So Southerners can have big cities and culture still despite the major share of their population lives in nomadic style. Same as in medieval Europe where most of the population was rural.

Good point. I personally see the Southerners as traders, craftsmen and artists. The units. if not nomadic, at least imply a mercantile civilization.

I love the name Dunefolk but I do question whether it would be appropriate for the faction name to be the same as the race name. The Drakes and somewhat the Undead fit this bill but for rather specific reasons. In my head there has yet to be another reasonable race name than Dunefolk (as humans) or just Human. I do believe the poll is more to guide the discussion rather than decide, so nothing is final besides the lesser suggestions being thrown out.

[BTIsaac]

I love the name Dunefolk but I do question whether it would be appropriate for the faction name to be the same as the race name. The Drakes and somewhat the Undead fit this bill but for rather specific reasons. In my head there has yet to be another reasonable race name than Dunefolk (as humans) or just Human. I do believe the poll is more to guide the discussion rather than decide, so nothing is final besides the lesser suggestions being thrown out.

That's what I figured. I did propose Emirate as a possible faction name but I'm guessing that didn't make the cut. Although if avoiding real world conotations is a criteria, sultanatehas a similar issue.

As for making the race name "human", well, the race name for the Aragwaithi is also not listed as human, so I don't think that's a problem. Also, from a more practical point of view, the Humans folder in the help menu is already ridiculously cluttered and difficult to browse. The question is, is it really necessary to make that list longer?

[Bitron]

I love the name Dunefolk but I do question whether it would be appropriate for the faction name to be the same as the race name. The Drakes and somewhat the Undead fit this bill but for rather specific reasons. In my head there has yet to be another reasonable race name than Dunefolk (as humans) or just Human. I do believe the poll is more to guide the discussion rather than decide, so nothing is final besides the lesser suggestions being thrown out.

I'd suggest to use the same way as before, means Dunefolk Human as race name, dunefolk as id and Dunefolk as faction name. As Prefix dune would probably do the job, though personally I just like to use complete names.
I really like the name Dunefolk... Well, I guess Southerners would be fitting as well, but then they somehow are always bound to a location, the south. What if they want to change their location at some point?
That's my bit to this topic. :)

[mintleaf]

I really like the name Dunefolk... Well, I guess Southerners would be fitting as well, but then they somehow are always bound to a location, the south. What if they want to change their location at some point?
That's my bit to this topic.

Although I was the first to suggest Southerner/Southern Kingdom, I completely agree with you. It was more of a placeholder, which I at least found better than the existing Khalifate. It mistakenly implies a rivalry with the Northerners. Not only that but having a North faction and a South faction suggest that there is a central faction. While Wesnoth is at the center of the narrative and the game, we play all sorts of people that interact with the Kingdom and not solely the Kingdom itself.

[name]

Also, from a more practical point of view, the Humans folder in the help menu is already ridiculously cluttered and difficult to browse. The question is, is it really necessary to make that list longer?

I'd suggest to use the same way as before, means Dunefolk Human as race name, dunefolk as id and Dunefolk as faction name.

The problem is that "race" in mainline wesnoth means a whole other species or more likely something far more different. In terms of real life biological taxon, orcs might be in the same genus, mermish in the same class and woses in the same kingdom as humans. At best. So classifying ordinary humans as a separate race in mainline wesnoth is like classifying people with red hair as a separate species.

There are problems with keeping them as human though. First is that as mentioned, the help menu is overflowing with humans, the vast majority being loyalist units. Which brings us to the second issue. The loyalists already are the "human" faction. Suddenly with dunefolk you have two human factions, with relatively similar (history-oriented rather than fantasy) aesthetics. But there are not two orc factions or two drake factions or two dwarf factions, etc.

A solution proposed earlier was to change the one race that makes up the dunefolk faction, from human to jinn or another mythical race of near eastern origin. The advantages are that it would fix the issue in a wesnoth-consistent way and allow more flexibility for game balance (the resistances could be whatever multiplayer balance required rather than staying close to the norm for other human units) and unit graphics could get more creative and look less similar to loyalists.

A modification to this solution that I propose is to make the dunefolk a multi-racial faction, like most other mainline factions. This would fix all of the above issues and have the above perks but would also solve another issue this faction has, of being the only one that has units of the same race (and thus very similar appearance) occupying several alignments at once. Making units of each alignment within this faction their own race makes it clearer which units should attack at a different time of day from the rest. (Especially important for players new to the game or just this faction.)

[Sapient]

FWIW, I thought Nomad Empire sounded cool; it just didn't quite fit with my expectation for how I hope the faction will be developed and presented.

On a completely unrelated note, Samarkand is a real city in Uzbekistan but Zanarkand is a city which appears in the video game Final Fantasy X. So, we wouldn't have been the first ones to appropriate that name for fantasy purposes. When you're dealing with such an ancient and mysterious location like that it does sort of veer into legit fantasy territory, IMO.

[Vyncyn]

A solution proposed earlier was to change the one race that makes up the dunefolk faction, from human to jinn or another mythical race of near eastern origin.

Changing the race would mean we need to change the unit sprites aswell, which means a lot of work (and throwing away the old ones ).
We could change the race and leave the sprites as they are now, but what's the point of that? It wouldn't make sense to have the humans in this faction look the same as the jinns (or another mythical race).
The fire-spirit was suggested as a placeholder, but that's just one unit without any advancement. And the Jinns I have seen in addons don't fit with the mainline artstyle.

My proposal would be to divide the "human" race in a "human [Wesnoth]" and "human [Dune/Southern]" or something similar.
But I would be fine with leaving it as it is now (1 human race and 1 khalifate race, though the later one should be renamed).

[name]

Avoiding waste of artwork would actually be an argument for making any sizeable changes at this point in time.

Only about 5% to 15% of the sprite work is already done for this faction, since most of the unique frames that have to be drawn go to the longish movement animations times the number of un-mirror-ed face-able directions (which is four- north, south, northerly-west and southerly-west, the two remaining easts are mirrored from the latter two wests or vice versa).

The faction is also imbalanced to the point that unit designs should not be considered final. For examples, the loyalists originally had the sergeant and ogre lines as recruitable units, the knalgans had thugs and I believe the undead had the chocobone rider (or however it was spelled). All of these significant faction changes and more were driven by early on balance issues.

Further, at this point in time, every unit of every mainline faction has been visually redesigned and redrawn from scratch at least once before reaching its current state (and then beginning to receive final animations).

Placeholder base frames could be pulled from the vast pool of UMC sprites, many of which do also come with advancement lines, and these could be further touched up or modified to fit the themes of a jinn or other race. Just as a placeholder, it does not need to be perfect for starters, just to get the idea across for later. The final sprites should never be drawn before the faction is balanced to the point of being largely stable, to prevent work waste.

[Bitron]

My proposal would be to divide the "human" race in a "human [Wesnoth]" and "human [Dune/Southern]" or something similar.
But I would be fine with leaving it as it is now (1 human race and 1 khalifate race, though the later one should be renamed).

The German translation is pretty much set up like that. Translated wordwise, in the help menu it is devided into "Human (Wesnoth)" and "Human (Khalifate)". I thought it is like that in most of the languages. Maybe I was wrong about that. Or in other words, in at least one language it is already implemented this way, so why not changing it like that.

[BTIsaac]

Araghwaith are treated as a separate race, and they're human for all intents and purposes. Nothing needs to be changed.

[name]

Aragwaithi are not included in the game. They are UMC.

[BTIsaac]

Doesn't change the fact that they're treated as a separate race.

[mintleaf]

Aragwaithi are not included in the game. They are UMC.

Doesn't change the fact that they're treated as a separate race.

UMC follows vastly different standards, and sometimes hardly any. Base Wesnoth has to be consistent all throughout. Doesn't mean we can't learn from UMC though.

[monochromatic]

My proposal would be to divide the "human" race in a "human [Wesnoth]" and "human [Dune/Southern]" or something similar.
But I would be fine with leaving it as it is now (1 human race and 1 khalifate race, though the later one should be renamed).

Since the Khalifate have a fundamentally different movetype than Wesnothian humans, I wonder if it would be confusing for a newer player. The human race currently (across four MP factions) all have the same fundamental movetype and signature resistance (+10% arcane). Having a separate branch of humans with completely different resistances seems unnecessarily complicated and inconsistent to me. I would be in favor of keeping the two races separate. This way, the lore need not be tied-in with Wesnothian history. The drakes, dwarves, elves, goblins, orcs, saurians, trolls, and even woses are all highly anthropomorphic, so including a new humanoid race wouldn't be out-of-place, I think. This way their movetype is also distinguished from the other races.

[Deciton_Reven]

I personally enjoy when a single race is allowed more than 1 culture. All humans are Wesnonian is kinda limited in view and suffocates trying to do something different with a race later if it was already shot down previously "because it doesn't exist already". If there was ever a time for establishing a healthy precedent it's probably now. And it's not exactly unheard of in Wesnoth the game proper. The Quenoth Elves are not a different kind of elf, just a different culture that adapted to a different climate (in a different year).

Now I do agree what ever the Khalifate end up being called, should they remain human they should get there own 'race' page anyway. "Southern Humans", "Humans - Dune", however, and the Wesnonian humans get the same treatment, as their origins and culture are distinct and need it to not clutter the other human page, less one or neither get read due to the daunting size. I mean it's almost kinda of silly not to have some dimorphism in a species, especially the ones more grounded in reality like humans. It would be like saying all horses were Clydesdales in wesnoth and any other similar 4 legged horse shaped creature was something else entirely.