What's in a name?

from GalCiv3 Forums

So, I was playing TOA last night, and it occured to me that in at least one other 4x space game, you have the ability to name your ships when they are built/launched.

In the later game, this isn't as big of a deal, but in the early game, when you have say less than a dozen ships, some of those being on long range scouting missions, well it'd be nice to be able to identify with them as other than scout ship #3...

Sure, colony ships will probably go unnoticed, i.e. galactic transport #3, but even then, this might be an interesting way to identify where a ship is going when you are scrolling through the shiplist, i.e. Colony Ship Vega 3 instead of just Colony Ship 3.

Plus the game could always default to ship # 3, 8 or whatever, if you can't be bothered.  Or perhaps there is a generic list of names, maybe even broken down by size, that players/designers simply add to the game folder, and the game assigns those names to ships in some fashion.

It's a small personal touch, but in the Ascendancy I name ships after their star of origin often, especially the huge ones...

21,253 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

You can name ships already.

 

EDIT: Or do you mean you want them auto-named?

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I was not aware of this.  As far as I knew, you could only name ship classes/designs, not assign a different name to each individual ship.

In Ascendancy, a popup appears asking you to name the specific ship as soon as you select it's class for construction.

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Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting tjashen, reply 2

I was not aware of this.  As far as I knew, you could only name ship classes/designs, not assign a different name to each individual ship.

Nope, you can name everything in the game aside from unclaimed planets. It would be cool if they got auto-generated proper names though.

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

possibly have themes or something you could choose from for each class of ship

with each race having its unique themes ( might be something for further down the line like in an expansion, seems to me like it would require a lot of fluff history for each of the races)

Reply #5 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

The DIN Lord Kona (Drengin Imperial Navy).

Of course, I usually end up with rather descriptive albiet unimaginative class names, like the Tiny MR Colonizer Mk III... but class names aren't quite the same as what I'm talking about.

If I have to right click or something to get to the screen to name an individual ship, that's an extra step that I'll probably not take.  It'd be nice if there was a game option "show ship naming pop up", or an autofilled naming line appears in the listing of completed tiles/ships that I can change at that point, or so that when I select the class for construction, the naming option is right there to click on, and autofilled with a generic name already, or ignore if I'm good with "Long Range Scout #3".

Also, as I noted above, if you could make a file with a list of names for the game to draw from for your custom race, or edit the core race shipnames list file, and drop it in the game folder, that'd be cool.  It could even be a simple text file, although I suspect it would be an .xml file (still editable with notepad of course).

It was just a thought. 

 

I was just playing Ascendancy again.  Ascendancy has you build each ship by hand (choosing components at that time), with no 'class' selector, just a size selector.  Ascendancy also limits you to 1 ship per star system (+1 extra for the home system), so ships tend to go it alone more in that game, and take a good number of turns to build, especially in the early game.  Generally, a new ship tech often comes on line between builds at any given planet, so designs tend to change on the fly anyways. 

I'm NOT suggesting that the designer change for GalCiv in that direction by any means, of course.  I like not having to constantly redesign ships once I've designed them once.  Just a more obvious naming field when the ship is chosen for the build cue, or when construction is complete.

BTW, I'm playing the 1995 version of Ascendancy.  The newer version is Ipad only, and I don't game on my Ipad (its a work issued Ipad, so it is for work stuff only).

 

Reply #6 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Yes, you can name individual ships, planets you own, and stars by clicking on the little page icon next to it's name.