Das123

Join Date 05/2003

+82

Random Name Generator needs some love

I'm finding that the name and city-name generator in Legendary Heroes (and ever since Elemental) is perhaps the worst execution of this sort of engine I have seen. Don't get me wrong, I love playing Legendary Heroes and it is probably my favourite game - but I find the random names it generates completely uninspiring.

You can look at single-developer games such as Dwarf Fortress or Distant Worlds and the names they generate are simple amazing and offer so much to the flavour of the game.

Legendary Heroes is an amazingly immersive game in most ways now - but then you end up with cities that sound like your cat has accidentally stepped on your computer.

I'd pay another $5 just to have DLC that corrected this - it annoys me that much.

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I agree, but seriously, this is way down on the priority list.

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Which is really a shame.

Cities should have really impressive names. For example one could look at all Fantasy Books there are and none of themwould have a city by the name of "Oahkavvhrk" or any other random name our generator spits out.

Perhaps the names should be more bound to the backstory of Elemental? And be directly influenced weather or not your faction is a Kingdom/Empire and what Faction Treats it has.

That would definately make it more .. um .. interesting (?)

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FWIW, you can rename almost anything in the game, whether it belongs to you or no.

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Quoting myosin2p,

reply 3

FWIW, you can rename almost anything in the game, whether it belongs to you or no.

I had no idea. That's pretty funny. I remember in Alpha Centauri (where the names were all preset, and the theme was pretty strong) the AI would rename conquered cities after it held them for several turns. An announcement popped up and it really made me angry (in a good way). Whereas in Civ I would always view cities as game pieces, when the AI renamed Library of Planet to Valley of the Faithful it would make me go all middle-east arab-israeli "that's MY LAND".

And it had exactly zero gameplay meaning--it's the little touches, I guess.

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Murteas

Join Date 08/2003

+44

Quoting myosin2p,

reply 3

FWIW, you can rename almost anything in the game, whether it belongs to you or no.

Yes, I almost always have a slag by the name of fluffy running around the map somewhere.

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It's really easy to rename everything...I don't think this is something the devs need to spend even a minute on. There's not exactly a rich backstory of source material to dig from. Like any other game, the pre-made races all have a list of pre-generated city names. When you go ahead and make your own faction I don't think you can expect them to have a good list of city names for you, so all the name-generator is doing is tossing a bunch of random letters together (sometimes with amusing results). If you were playing a custom faction in Civilization, I highly doubt most people were taking pre-generated city names. Why would I want the capital of my race of war-mongering savages to be called Paris?

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I rename every city and custom unit so I've never used the generator.

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You use the generator when you create the city/unit/sovereign/champion/faction. Also being able to rename everything does not fix the name generator.

Yes you can rename but its still really disrupting the lfow of the game if you must rename every unit because e.g. "Mushashiklas" is not acceptable as a city name.

The easiest fix would be to allow us to choose a seed for name generation when we create a custom race. Which has premade names in it. (Probably around 15 would be enough)

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I rename things to provide some attribute info. For example, I put a "/A" after the name of an assassin.

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Hm thats an interesting idea Fuzzy.

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YES! While occasionally entertaining, this random name generator is much more often just stupid. Of course, if the nefarious purpose of the devs was to prompt the player to quit being so lazy and think up a name on his own... well then your plan is working, damn it!

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Now I need to write a book where a city was named because the ruler swallowed a bug and coughed at the wrong moment during his founding speech.

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I must be stranger than I thought. I like the random names that are generated. Like the monster and spell names and other Lore stuff, it doesn't have a direct reference to other fantasy settings. For me, it has the feel of a naming system based on assumptions and contexts that don't need to match mine.

I put the word "Old" in front of cities that will become Conclaves. I put the word "Fort" in front of cities that will become Fortresses. That's all the renaming I need. (I did make a Conclave named Old New Pariden, but that was just being silly.)

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