Right now, individual ships have no name, they're known simply by the template they belong to. I'd like to see individual ships have names (in addition to templates, obviously).



Part of this feature could be that the player provides a list of ship names somewhere (maybe a text file with alphanumeric names separated by semicolons). When a ship is completed it takes a random, unused ship name from the list. (If it runs out of names it could name them after conquered star systems, or append a number to the end - "USS Enterprise II"



Further to this, I'd like to see naming conventions. Perhaps the player could choose to have one prefix for all vessels, like USS or HMS or what have you. Perhaps the player could choose to have each class of vessel have its own, eg all destroyers have DD at the front of their name, battleships have BB.



Quick mock up to show what I mean (would need to have bigger icons to fit decent sized names on, I guess):







The result of this would be a very easy and latency-friendly way to customise player's civilisations. Maybe lists going into multiplayer games would need to be filtered for curses, but that woudn't be much harder than filtering usernames if there were reasonable limits on the inputs (eg filesize of the list of names and restricting characters to A-Z)

I don't really see the point of having individual ship names other than adding a roleplaying element into a RTS game. Ships should be identified by what type of fitting they have, that's much more important than what name they have painted on the side of their ship.

Remscar wrote:
I don't really see the point of having individual ship names other than adding a roleplaying element into a RTS game. Ships should be identified by what type of fitting they have, that's much more important than what name they have painted on the side of their ship.

Having individual names doesn't detract from any of the above, and RPG elements are already present.

Panopticon wrote:
Having individual names doesn't detract from any of the above, and RPG elements are already present.

I'm aware that they don't detract from any outstanding system, but my point is relevancy.

Remscar wrote:
I'm aware that they don't detract from any outstanding system, but my point is relevancy.

Immersion and customisation. Giving the player the ability to be more involved in things if the player chooses. The entire concept of ship building is so appealing for those reasons.

If they decided to do this the easiest way to do a custom naming convention is probably to use excel or some other spreadsheet software and list names in boxes. Maybe have them placed in a custom folder and name the files along the lines of _. e.g. UnitedEmpire_Destroyers.



I wouldn't mind seeing this as a feature but honestly there is a few of other things I would rather see first that actually enhance gameplay.

valmarus wrote:
If they decided to do this the easiest way to do a custom naming convention is probably to use excel or some other spreadsheet software and list names in boxes. Maybe have them placed in a custom folder and name the files along the lines of _. e.g. UnitedEmpire_Destroyers.

Sure, I think most of Paradox's grand strategy games do it with external CSV files (which I'm basing this suggestion from)

As for the prefixes you can just add them to the beginning of the name yourself in the custom name file.

valmarus wrote:
As for the prefixes you can just add them to the beginning of the name yourself in the custom name file.

True, but prefixes being distinct from the name would allow for naming ships after star systems without breaking the player's scheme

Remscar wrote:
I don't really see the point of having individual ship names other than adding a roleplaying element into a RTS game. Ships should be identified by what type of fitting they have, that's much more important than what name they have painted on the side of their ship.

Ship names could incorporate class types. in the UK's Royal Navy all of the submarines in the Vanguard class start with a V (Vanguard, Victorious, Vigilant, Vengeance) all of the River class patrol vessel are (wait for it) named after rivers. and the River class succeed the Island-class patrol vessel).



It could be possible for there to be some sort of naming preset when designing the ship, the ability to designate how a ship is named (alphabetically, mythical gods, cities, fish) though it could become quite complicated very quickly (all Cruisers names are "C" all missile Cruisers are cities starting with "C") a hell of a lot of work putting in all the possible variations on this theme for the ships (maybe this would make a good mod?) but it could add a interesting dimension to the ships, making them more than identical cannon fodder

I wouldn't have anything against ships having names, but there is the practical application of, where do you show them while still having space for each ships "model", if you will.

If they stick it in the info panel when you mouse over/click on a ship then alright, but for almost all other other areas it would either not fit, or require some problematic tweaking of the UI design.



I'd much rather have longer names for your ship types than what we have right now, but again, increasing that would cause issues with the basic game play readability.

I quite like the idea of naming ships. Something I've done in several other games is to have a system set out, and to do it manually. However a nice system like has been suggested would be much appreciated! In a best case scenario, the naming system could be as complicated, or as simple, as the player decides. As has been mentioned, basic game play readability should be given higher priority than something like this, however if it could be implemented, it would make me, and many others, very happy people.

I am for personalise ship names in addition to class of ships already in place in game

Century wrote:
Ship names could incorporate class types. in the UK's Royal Navy all of the submarines in the Vanguard class start with a V (Vanguard, Victorious, Vigilant, Vengeance) all of the River class patrol vessel are (wait for it) named after rivers. and the River class succeed the Island-class patrol vessel).



It could be possible for there to be some sort of naming preset when designing the ship, the ability to designate how a ship is named (alphabetically, mythical gods, cities, fish) though it could become quite complicated very quickly (all Cruisers names are "C" all missile Cruisers are cities starting with "C") a hell of a lot of work putting in all the possible variations on this theme for the ships (maybe this would make a good mod?) but it could add a interesting dimension to the ships, making them more than identical cannon fodder

Well this would be be achievable with the suggestion I made of having file names for each hull type. e.g. Horatio_Cruiser. It would, should they choose to impliment it, also in theory be possible to make it definable by hull and design e.g. Horatio_Corvette_Scout, which would create a pool of names for all horatio corvette hulls with the scout design (having the game ignore the number at the end it automatically places on the names on autoupgrades).