the common "villages" complaint

[Erk]

I've only been browsing the wesnoth forum for a couple days, and I've already seen people struggling to cope with the abstraction that a house icon represents an entire village, and offering "solutions" like making all the villages look like clusters of doll houses. I'm assuming this is a frequent issue: my confusion, then, is why they are still called "villages"? Why not use a more generic term that could refer to a single cottage or a small group of them?

I suggest exchanging the word village for "holding". It's more ambiguous, and it actually suits the tone of the game more in terms of what villages do, in my opinion. It could also allow designers to put in more abstract things as "holdings" without the game having to call them "villages", for what that's worth. (mines, docks, farms, wells... what have you)

[TheBladeRoden]

I just call them Inns, due to their secondary function.

[Sorrow]

I like village, i've never even thought twice about it. Armys don't fight over a vast battle field covered in cottages, and "inns" certainly don't pay you to stay in them.
Cottage/Inn makes much less sense I think.

[playtom]

well, i think i saw an icon of multiple villages reduced in sized and made into one hex, which makes more sense, it is in some user add-ons, is it the"great race" ?

[Weeksy]

They are meant to be actual villages, with lots of houses. It's just a whole lot easier to see what's going on when there's just one house. AFAIK that's been the official stance the entire way through, that specks of housing all over the place are ugly and hard to make out.

[MDG]

I think it is either issues with how the unit sprites look on tiles with multiple houses, or how the houses themselves look at the size required to fit them in the hex, or the increased complexity for terrain transitions means any potential benefit is not considered sufficient.

[Clonkinator]

Actually, those villages only represent villages. They aren't real villages, of course, but hey, why do you care about this either? I like it the way it is, and I would be annoyed if it was changed.

[CIB]

Well, it might make sense for small maps, but on maps like Fall of Trent they are rather houses, really.

[Erk]

Calling them inns, or cottages, or even villages implies that they are a single certain thing. That's why I suggest "holding": it is an ambiguous term. It could be a single home, a village-sized collection of houses, or pretty much anything else. Additionally, the term is so unused in that context in modern English that there are really no preconceptions applied to it, so if you call, say, a ship in port a "holding" nobody is going to call you on it and it isn't going to seem off. Meanwhile, in various campaigns and scenarios, "villages" are used to represent anything from a village to a section of a city to a single house. "Village" really isn't an appropriate term for them.

[zookeeper]

Calling them inns, or cottages, or even villages implies that they are a single certain thing. That's why I suggest "holding": it is an ambiguous term. It could be a single home, a village-sized collection of houses, or pretty much anything else. Additionally, the term is so unused in that context in modern English that there are really no preconceptions applied to it, so if you call, say, a ship in port a "holding" nobody is going to call you on it and it isn't going to seem off. Meanwhile, in various campaigns and scenarios, "villages" are used to represent anything from a village to a section of a city to a single house. "Village" really isn't an appropriate term for them.

I agree with that rationale, and "holding" is a rather good term to call what villages actually represent...however, it completely lacks any flavour, and it perhaps isn't very intuitive either. "Village" is pretty straightforward and it takes a player about a minute to realize that that a village is the basic unit that provides you with gold. If the name was "holding", it wouldn't really be clear whether there can be other types of "holdings" besides these houses/villages (and in mainline there indeed aren't). While Wesnoth gameplay is rather abstract as are the graphics, it's IMHO not quite abstract enough to make it a good idea to start calling villages "holdings".

If I'd want to rename "villages" to something else, "holding" is so far the best proposal I've heard though.

[locutus]

i dont think there is any need to go on about this. of you havent noticed part of the atmosphere of wesnoth is the representations in it. i mean the campaign portraits look nothing like the units that represent them. if we can accept that, why cant we accept this?

[Raemon]

I always thought the portraits were quite accurate . . .

I quite like the idea of renaming 'villages' to 'holdings', but it's not a big deal.

[waw]

i dont think there is any need to go on about this. of you havent noticed part of the atmosphere of wesnoth is the representations in it. i mean the campaign portraits look nothing like the units that represent them. if we can accept that, why cant we accept this?

I think there is a lot of reasoning to go on with this. Changing it doesn't hurt, it just takes somebody a lot of work. But on top of that, conversation about it only leads to knew thinking and better ideas. The conversation shouldn't be stopped just because somebody doesn't want to partake.

As for the portraits, they are close enough we recognize them. If we didn't recognize them... we would reject them. They are close enough at least.

Back to the topic at hand, calling holdings really does allow people to organize cities on large scales. It doesn't make sense to have a walled city have a bunch of villages in it. Now, if you make one that actually looks large, you could have say, 10-20 villages inside. It gets ridiculous. Rather, if you had that many holdings of buildings that represented whatever the scenario needed the to be, it would be much more unique, more liked, in my opinion.

Holding even sounds more unique than village simply because it isn't used anymore. Like its been said, a holding can be anything from an actual village to a single building. Simply changing the name doesn't harm anything... albeit, it would be a lot of work to go through and change.

All in all, Erk's argument is thought out well and thorough and shouldn't be something just tossed away.

[irrevenant]

Using the name "Holding" would open the door for a variety of different types of scenario-specific holdings: Villages, Inns, Forts, Farms, etc. etc. A couple of possible alternatives for naming: Haven, Shelter, Stronghold, Defensive Structure, Aegis, Refuge.

As to replacing the current (single-house) village art with multi-building village art: please "put up or shut up". It requires the creation of 72x72 pixel art that not only looks good on it's own, but also doesn't look stupid with a unit standing in front of it. I don't think it's practical, but feel free to create the art to prove me wrong. Until that's done, there's nothing more to see here, folks.

[Simons Mith]

All I would like to say is look at the little stockaded villages from the Dragon Pass board game. I just wish I had a decent scan to point people to.