Writing a game.. your help appreciated :)

It appears, that they haven't been founded yet. Also, this is the perspective of the NPC (grey), things out of its sight are not recorded on the map.

If a player decides to found a village in italy, of course it will be called Rome. And in northern Africa there's of course Carthage. There are about 100 city names in the system, all cities founded in other territory or in a regio of which the city is already in existance, it will generate a random name. And technically the server can even handle up to 200 cities. But as I said, this here world has only been running for a few days, much more villages are to be founded and there are no major cities yet.

Thanks, I'll change Dubvronik

The map costed me ALOT of trouble, to get all the data transferred through the server efficiently, but also because it has to look natural, so things like names that shouldn't overlap seem obvious, but I had to write rules for that as well. I draw the background picture, but everything else is calculated by the game. It is now generated in just a few seconds from the player's request

The map looks a bit sober now, but when I'm launching it with actual players it will end up brightly coloured with many different territories

Every town starts off with a small territory (province), the coloured circles you see around the villages. They can be upgraded as soon as they become real cities, so the circles will become larger and larger. Having a larger territory has several advantages - first, your troops move faster in it and you can merge them into the city at any time. You can gain gold from foreigners that stay in it, and most imporantly, you drain resources from your soil, so the bigger the territory, the slower this depletion, and the more farms you can house. Expanding territory may also suddenly enable you to build a navy, whenever a piece of sea becomes part of the province.

When the circles overlap it will calculate what part should belong to what city, by checking which city is the nearest at that point.

It works!!! Did the very first real test with an actual user over the net, 2 logged in simultaniously, whining to update the map all the time, and the server held, no errors, no bugs

Now, I need some more city names, especially UK area and around the western borders of Russia. Other names are also welcome of course! For the record: we're talking about somewhere around 0-800 AD towns..