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The Big Question A. How would you call the population limit of a specific player that can be extended during a game? B. How would you call the population limit of any player that cannot be extended during a game? Rules: The answer for A and B must be different. Feel free to provide multiple answers. Generally, the fewer and shorter the words, the better. Extra points if your choice for A cannot be misunderstood for B, your choice for B cannot misunderstood for A, and none of your choices can be misunderstood for a different concept (e.g. the sum of the A or B limits of all players during a game, or the maximum B limit of 0 A.D. itself). Explain! Explain! I’ve recently started working on an English Style Guide for 0 A.D. The goal is to provide developers with guidelines to follow when writting user-facing texts, so that game texts gain consistency providing a slightly better experience for players and a significantly better experience for translators. So I am reviewing translator reports about English strings, and trying to build the English Style Guide as I improve the affected English strings. I believe some of the core principles of English style guides for software are: Use unambiguous words to refer to a concept. Always the same words to refer to the same concept. Never use the same words to refer to two different concepts. And there is one clear case where the current texts of 0 A.D. break all of these rules: the population limit. (Thanks to @GunChleoc for bringing it up on Transifex) See, 0 A.D. does not have a single population limit. We have two different population limits: A. The population limit of a specific player during a game, that can be extended by building houses, researching technologies, and so on. B. The population limit of any player during a specific game, the one that no player can surpass regardless of houses built, technologies researched, and so on. And the terminology that we use in 0 A.D. to refer to them is often ambiguous, with different words used in different parts of the game, and with the same words use to refer to both types of population limit in different parts of the game. Used words include: population limit, population cap, maximum population, maximum population limit. So I wish your feedback in finding the right terminology to handle these concepts in the game texts. I propose to keep this topic open until someone proposes a clear winner or, if there is no clear winner some time from now, to create a poll to choose one. I would rather not rush the choice, but I wish to have this settled by the time I finish dealing with the rest of the issues raised by translators on Transifex (in maybe a few months). Advice Be creative. Check what other similar games use. Have a thesaurus at hand.
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