Naming Ships

[Breniir]

Just a quick question - how will ship names be generated? In MoO it didn't matter much since all the ships in that class were stuck in a single stack or two. In other games, notably Space Empires 4 and Galactic Civilizations 2, they simply tack on a number to the class name.

I presume there will be some method to rename a ship once it's built, but how will the game actually handle generating the initial name?

[Zaimat]

Good question, right now it just puts a number (the actual array index number in fact) as it makes it easy for testing. So anything can happen still.

I'm personally more fond of giving ships names, for me it makes them a little more special/unique. Should be able to rename it anytime.
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Horizon - Lead Designer

[Breniir]

Sweet. In games with hundreds of ships in a fleet, it doesn't seem to matter much, but it looks like Horizon will have small enough numbers that you can have the ONE battlecruiser named Hood, or the battleship Texas.

[Therlun]

I cant wait to start my "Explorer"

An easy and mod friendly solution would be to just have a Textfile with possible names...

[Breniir]

That's how Space Empires 4 does it, and I assume 5 based on some of the screen captures. I'm playing a decent Star Trek mod of SE4, and the Federation class list is a treasure trove of great names.

I was kind of annoyed with GalCiv2 and how the AI named things. Modern day naval sizes were tossed around at will, and they are just <Race name> <Generic Class> (Cruiser) 9-13 or something similar. Nice to be able to gauge the relative tech level of a ship, but it leaves much to be desired for cool factor. For instance, the Yor, the evil semi-borg robots of the game, should have names like Annihilator or Eradicator, not Yor Frigate 3-9.