CityVille Clerk's Office: Everything you need to know

The long awaited release of a "rename" feature has finally hit CityVille via the inclusion of a new Clerk's Office building. Through this building, you'll be able to rename both your businesses (including those that have franchises), and even your City, but there are a couple of catches.

First, you'll need to build the Clerk's Office itself, which can be found for free in your inventory. Building it will take six hits, or six energy in total. You'll then need to collect the proper building supplies (rather than gathering staff) to finish its construction.

These items come in the form of three each of Inkpads, Manila Folders, Marble blocks, Visors, and City Seals. You may luckily already have the City Seals and Marble blocks, so you'll only need to ask for nine items rather than the full 15. Meet us behind the break for more on this exciting new feature.

After you finish building your Clerk's Office, you'd think that you could start a spree of renaming businesses and franchises, but it's actually a bit more complicated than that. By clicking on the Clerk's Office, you'll be able to bring up the Renaming Menu. From there, you'll see a list of your businesses, along with how many signature approvals you'll need in order to change the name of that business. In an effort to add some realism to this feature, you'll need signatures as a way to gain public approval for the change, although we doubt your friends would really say no just to be snarky.

At any rate, different businesses require different amounts of signatures, and businesses that are part of franchises will require more signatures based on how many franchise locations are currently open. To rename your city, you can simply click on the top-most "Propose New Name" button in this menu, while renaming any business is done by clicking on the box directly to the right of it.

Once you have proposed a new name, you'll need to click on the "Get Signatures" button to post a general news item to your wall that your friends can click on to send you a signature. You can only propose a new name for something once every four hours, but the feed item that you post can accept up to 10 signatures, which will complete the requirement for most of you before time becomes a factor.

Renaming a franchise will change not only the business's name in your own city, but also automatically change the name of the business in every other city it's located in as well, hence the requirement of more signatures, as this will clearly change your friends' towns as well.

Either way, this is an exciting new feature to CityVille that, yes, probably should have been included from the start, but we're happy to say "better late than never" with this one.

[Final image credit: Zynga]

Check out the rest of our CityVille Cheats & Tips right here.

What do you think? Did Zynga make the process of renaming businesses too complicated?