Name themes for ship classes instead of types

[hawkeye]

Would it be possible, perhaps for the DLC (or later on), to have the ability to assign a name theme to specific classes of ships.

Aurora 4X (if anyone is familiar with that game) has such a feature, where you can specify a name-theme for each ship-class you create, so you could have a class of DDs named after tribes, a class of cruisers named after German cities and a class of battleships named after US states.

[attemptingsuccess]

This could be interesting

[wlbjork]

Yeah, I guess we'd have to be able to create our own theme name files, presumably in notepad/wordpad and direct the game to the correct file. However, it would allow us to name ships consecutively in the desired order rather than having to rename every ship that wound up with an inappropriate name. Bonus points if it allows us to have the first ship not take the class name.

[attemptingsuccess]

Yeah I remember I wanted a class of ships that have names starting with C.

[seawolf]

We’ve talked about making a mod to do this, it would be pretty simple on the player side. Harder for the AI but I might release a temporary one for the player only

[charliezulu]

Expanding on this functionality a bit, there's some fun stuff that could be done when it comes to variables beyond just loading a list. As an extreme example, let's say I'm playing a USN game, and want to name my large cruisers after overseas territories, following the naming scheme of "USS [name] (CB-#)". Right now, that doesn't work in-game for a few reasons:

* The game will just give you battlecruiser names, instead of following a themed list (which is the main problem, and what the theme proposal will fix)
* There's no "USS" prefix at the front, although this is an easy enough fix using current methods (replace all USN names with the name and a USN prefix)
* There's no hull symbol and number at the end of the name. This is somewhat harder under the current system if the namelist is loaded non-sequentially
* There's no provisions for new names showing up on the fly. If America captures, say, Iceland, then it's conceivable that the Alaska class could have had a ship called "Iceland"; likewise, if Guam were captured, USS Guam (CB-2) probably isn't going to be called that. The same applies to things like famous battles like "Midway", "Tarawa", and "Coral Sea".

However, these are all things that can be done fairly easily, IMO. In addition to the "Class name" box currently in the editor, an editable textbox could be added immediately below that for "Ship name format". By default (and under AI/auto-suggest behaviour), the "ship name format" would just be the same behaviour as currently (loading from the default namelist for the ship type), and thus represented with something like [$USN_BB] or [$US_States] if you're designing a USN battleship and want to use state names, and USN_BB being an identifier string for the namelist. If you want to have a "USS" prefix on that, then, you'd manually change the text field to [USS $USN_BB], which is a relatively simple and intuitive change IMO. If you want to add in a (BB-1), (BB-2), etc. or have your destroyers be Z-1, Z-2, etc., then you add in something so that it's [USS $USN_BB (BB-#)] - the game fills in the # with the next highest number for every ship whose "ship name format" has a (BB-#) in it. Likewise, you could have dynamic name lists beyond stuff like US_States, such as Historic_victories reading through the list of recorded victories, removing the "Battle of" text, and then using that as the ship name, or Controlled_territories looking at your current possessions not in your home area and using the possession name.

A more robust system could probably be created to allow for abitrarily complex names (e.g., adding escape characters, having a way for ship numbers to start at >1 without having to start and then immediately stop construction of a few KEs with the same identifier, etc), but as suggested this would still allow for replicating historical ship designations without having to go and manually name every ship to what you want.

[navalperson]

Hasn’t Tortuga kind of done this for ship types in his play through it just would have to be adjusted for certain classes.