Thalatta

@Genava55 As I said, literally, "proper villages [...] in the eyes of the Romans", you can just go and read Tacitus: "It is well known that the nations of Germany have no cities, and that they do not even tolerate closely contiguous dwellings. They live scattered and apart, just as a spring, a meadow, or a wood has attracted them. Their villages they do not arrange in our fashion, with the buildings connected and joined together, but every person surrounds his dwelling with an open space, either as a precaution against the disasters of fire, or because they do not know how to build", he's trashing their way to do it, for him they looked like big farms (and the ones you posted seem to be the biggest ones, a few extended families). But all this is, yet again, not even the point. The point is, according to A Grammar of Proto-Germanic, and the PGmc dictionary, and whatever other Proto-Germanic source we can cite, and if we agree that wīhsą can describe some kind of big farm or small village (which, again, could also be put into question according to yet another one of your cherry-picked criteria, since weihs has been used to translate agrós), then which term is closer to it, þurpą or haimaz? That is the ONLY question, and for whoever reads those sources the answer should be clear, as I already stated in my previous post.

I do check my info and make an effort I shouldn’t even do because I’m really not interested in arguing if the accepted Proto-Germanic reconstruction is wrong, which it isn’t, and what you have to check is your tone. Re-read my comments and realise that it’s not me stating you are “defending something weird that nobody talks about”, that’s you when for example called BS on the opinions I quoted from experts in the field. “Once again” it is you who acts like a condescending 12-year-old brat that feels the disgusting need to make pseudo-patronising “Brandolini's law” comments. It's not my fault if you can’t check info properly, just go to https://archive.org/details/diealthochdeutsc01steiuoft/page/n7/mode/2up, the column header meanings are on page 1. From there (and volume 3) you get the Sg. 911 and Sg. 242, which are dated from the very late 8th century (around 790 AD) and the 8th-11th centuries, respectively, as can be checked in https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch. It took me 20 minutes, no library needed (perfect place to make a condescending comment, I know, but lets have some class, shall we?). I only missed giving more span to the latter, because, again, I really don’t give a darn about spending time questioning the accepted reconstruction. I’m just giving evidence on why things are how they are, while you keep digressing towards centuries apart changes and ignoring any source that contradicts you regarding what matters: Proto-Germanic, from 500 BC to 1 BC. The only relevant thing is if haimaz is better or not for what is wanted. Nothing else. Luckily, I think I found exactly what’s needed: https://folksprak.org/common/material/pdf/A-Grammar-of-Proto-Germanic.pdf, which states that the Germans did not form villages but rather lived in isolated homesteads. Old Norse heimr, Old English hām and Old High German heim mean house or home, while Gothic uses haimos (only appearing in accusative plural) for village, and translates agrós 'land' to þaurp 'land, lived-on property', like Old Norse þorp 'farm, estate'. In West Germanic it means 'village', as in Old English þorp, Old High German dorf. In Gothic weihs 'village' also translates agrós. This is exactly what I meant with the demographic change, þurpą means what we need because there were no such things as proper villages, and both it and wīhsą seem to refer to whatever was there, call it land, property, farm, estate, with surely an extended family or more, and in the eyes of the Romans. I don’t see how any of them would be smaller or less appropriate than haimaz (taking from ON, OE and OHG). All this is exactly what the preferential reconstructions (are ordered entries important or not? Or is it just cherry-picking?) from the PGmc dictionary are telling us: haimaz is “house” first, “home” second, and “village” last, for þurpą the order is “village, settlement”, “gathering of people, crowd”, and “cleared land”, and for wīhsą it’s just “village, settlement”. All fits perfectly. If one travels in time it will look like a big farm or estate, conceptually it was the closest you could get to a village. They were not thinking in Phase I, II and III. And, as I said before, some branches kept it literal, while others kept the concept (which is what matters), and depending on each word. You are not going to convince me that the dictionary is wrong because, considering the source I cited and all the methodologies used that go way beyond your knowledge, it just isn't. If you have a problem with that, just take it to the ones that put it together, and use whatever word you want, I have better things to do honestly.

I agree, that's kind of my point 9 of the 20 points I suggested a couple of weeks ago

This sounds like just going with what the dictionary states, which is my position, mostly because in general it would be too much work to question what they say, and because things beyond our knowledge were also taken into account. In any case, I find using warją for the fortress a more pressing issue, I don’t think it is good to have repeated words if there are alternatives, all these situations deserve a second look given that @Vantha said “that's the case for some other civs too already”.

I’m just skeptical in ignoring what the Proto-Germanic dictionary says because of what Gothic says (which seems to have made choices opposite than the rest regarding this), when clearly this was already considered when the consensus was reached. It’s like reinventing the wheel. An interesting thing is that þurpą has been proposed to be related to the Latin turba, and for any Spanish speaker this is clearly related to a collective (meaning something like a mob). The Italic-Germanic split happened over 3000 years ago. Uncertain, but on the table, and shows that it is not generally assumed that þurpą was a singular unit early on. Only Gothic does that (as said, “in anderer Bed.”). With haimaz the Proto-Germanic reconstructions are home, house and village. I think there’s no way around that. It’s just like modern “home”, I could refer to my house, my hometown, or my homeland. That’s why I questioned it a bit, not that it can’t mean village (not from -heim though, but directly), but that it seemed too ambiguous. I don’t have a better alternative, I think we have exhausted what the PGmc dictionary has to offer. Alhs can mean settlement, but it seems too singular, and many other meanings are preferred https://kaikki.org/dictionary/Proto-Germanic/meaning/a/al/alhs.html.

@Genava55 Definitions 1 and 2 refer to Gl 1 and 3, both from the 8th century, so the meanings seem more simultaneous than sequential (one would need to believe the shift happened exactly there). The second line states "got. thaúrp (in anderer Bed.)", showing that in Gothic (the black sheep in all this) the meaning is different. Looking at the Old English lexicon: https://wehd.com/94/Thorp.html, the earliest reference, from 725 AD, treats conpetum, tuun, and þrop as equivalent, closer to a village than a single farm. The ending -heim doesn’t originally refer to a settlement, it’s the genitive ending of a singular personal name, as in Mannheim and Ingenheim meaning "Manne’s home" and "Ingo’s home" (or homeland), with the settlement meaning derived later.

@Genava55 The Codex Abrogans is from the 8th century. I shortened “villa worker” to “villager”, maybe changing the exact meaning, but the point remains that these things happened, even when they are later examples. I’m just trying to make sense of what the dictionaries actually say. Another issue could be how big these settlements are in context. You say the original meaning is farmstead, but what if a very small collection of farmsteads is also valid? At Proto-Germanic times this would have been the equivalent of a village (again, there has to be a reason why this has been reconstructed as such, besides commonality), and what meaning exactly had on the different branching languages could have turned out to be quite arbitrary and relative, Gothic could have retained a more farmstead position, while all the others considered the increased demographics. And related to this, coming back to the very beginning, what does say that þurpą has to be smaller than haimaz, which is primarily reconstructed as home? Maybe you can quote the relevant passages from the Codex Argenteus and Abrogans.

@Genava55 But Euler’s work comes after Ringe’s. Downgrading happens particularly with things perceived as "less than": ‘villain‘ comes from Latin ‘villanus‘, meaning ‘villager‘ (which would give credence to ‘village‘ being downgraded to ‘farmstead‘ and not the other way around), or ‘sinister‘, coming from Latin ‘left-handed‘, obvious for Italian speakers. So, what happened? A downgrading for Gothic or a collection for West and North Germanic languages? Even if Gothic was the more conservative, a consensus considering many other variables was reached and written down in Proto-Germanic dictionaries. If we grab a time machine we might find out that this was the wrong call, but it wouldn’t be an error on our part, but the academic consensus, and what can one really do about that but guess.

@Genava55 those books are over 20 years old (almost 40 in the first case), studies now support the notion that they were mutually unintelligible, for example linguist Wolfram Euler’s (curiously, yes, related to the famous mathematician) Das Westgermanische summary, https://www.verlag-inspiration.de/euler-das-westgermanische, already states “by the time of the Gothic translation of the Bible, Western and Eastern Germanic were already so dissimilar that Gothic and for example Frankish people could not have held a fluent conversation”. He got his PhD in 1979 but maybe you can send him an email stating that his work is BS anyway :P. Philologist Friedrich Maurer states that Old English, Old Dutch, Old Saxon, Old Frisian and Old High German (which has the word dorf) were already quite different early on, instead of just branching off from a common Proto-West Germanic, and for all those languages the meaning is village. In any case, even if we are dealing with scholars not agreeing among themselves (and we can cite their books ad infinitum), the elephant in the room is still the same: why not to think that Gothic was the one that suffered the semantic shift? And, more importantly, why has þurpą been reconstructed in PGmc dictionaries as village? (https://kaikki.org/dictionary/Proto-Germanic/meaning/%C3%BE/%C3%BEu/%C3%BEurp%C4%85.html).

@Genava55 but þurpą has been reconstructed as village because many other languages that come from Proto-Germanic have been studied and that was the conclusion reached. Gothic is an example of East Germanic languages, which were already unintelligible to West and North Germanic languages by around 200 AD, and for almost all of them the meaning is village, þorp in Old Norse for example. That Gothic is the "earliest Germanic language with significant information" doesn't mean it is the one that kept the original meaning, this would imply that all the others changed, even when they split before the time of the Codex Argenteus.

Warją could be used for the fortress, it means fortification (also embankment or dam), and it's the root of the German "Wehr", meaning defence.

Maybe wīhsą could be written like that. There’s also þurpą (the root of thorp and German Dorf), and alhs can also mean settlement. I’m not sure what would be the size ordering for all these and haimaz, which sounds too much like home for me, but it apparently did mean village also.

I just won the Coast Range scenario on Very Hard AI Difficulty when I thought I was about to lose because towards the end Petra seems to give up for no reason. I managed to repel a big attack (losing like a third of my territory, which was almost half of all land) and from then on it was a walk in the park... not sure what's the underlying issue, but I feel I should have lost. Open maps are a bit hard to defend with such a low population cap, unlike the Isthmus of Corinth, but I guess I have to be more aggressive. In short, it seems I just have to hold my ground until the AI has an existential crisis.

@Vantha@ShadowOfHassen well it seems I was going for historical accuracy when historical ambiguity was decided, which I find suboptimal since it misses the opportunity of teaching history. That's why I was thinking for each scenario to be specific historical events, like Hamilcar gaining control of the gold and silver mines of Sierra Morena, subduing certain Iberian tribes, and expanding to the east, for people to learn more things besides Hasdrubal and the (re)founding of Carthago Nova. At least these things are what I find interesting in historically themed RTS. I agree with not doing “the great commanders a bit of a disservice if you scale them back for a beginners tutorial”, but that's the opposite of what I proposed with the prelude concept (in case a proper Hannibal campaign was also wanted).

Indeed I think this will be a problem if implemented as proposed, and that there are solutions that could be also applied to other things (I've proposed a base garrison that can't be controlled for ships, siege engines and buildings), but maybe people complaining that the feature is broken will need to happen first.