Just curious, will you be able to name/ rename ships in this game? I guess it would be easy enough to implement, as ships canbe renamed in BoTF with the right save game editor, just wondering how it will work here?

Yes, you will be able to rename ships. I haven't decided on an interface yet, but you'll definitely be able to do it. I might let you rename fleets, too. "Decoy Fleet", "Fleet of Doom", etc.

Excellent, cheers Mike. And there will be no bloody A's, B's, C's etc I'm hoping!

I think I'll go with 1st fleet, 9th fleet etc. Maybe Battle Group Omega!

I couldn't see why you wouldn't be able to name every ship exactly the same. In fact, that could be quite an interesting thing to witness in a multiplayer battle.

I'll do that for the first game. If you see an entire fleet of ships named "Bob", then you know your doom is coming! Why Bob? Titan AE of course!

I wonder if there's a reason to ensure that every ship has a unique name (I can't really think of one except for maybe the above example). If so, then there could be -A, -B, etc for ships that share a name with a predecessor. After all, that is the canon solution for what it's worth.

Well hardly, since it's only ever applied to one ship name.

If anything, it would seem like a definite and obvious departure from canon to include the lettering, given that ship names like Lexington, Defiant and Prometheus are reused on later classes with respect to their previous namesakes, yet without any lettering. In addition to this, the lettering on the Enterprise (which is the only canon example) is part of the registry and not the name. The name is still just Enterprise.


The one major issue is if you use up ALL names for one class. One possible solution is to have a bank of hundreds of generic Fed ship names, which can be used automatically if all names for a certain class are used up, of for the computer to use names assigned to classes which are now obsolete. I guess it wouldn't matter for the other races as you probably wouldn't notice if you had 2 ships called IKS Grav'Tar.

Worst case scenario, I think it would be better to just reuse a name, even if there's a ship with that name already. At least it wouldn't have letters after it, so it wouldn't be too obvious if you had that many ships.

About the only thing I have to say, is I like what the Masterplan said about the first ship of a class having that name. The first Constitution class will be called USS Constitution.

Just reuse the names of ships that have been destroyed or decommissioned. That way, you wouldn't notice it at all.

You could form a database, of ship names, whether they exist in real time, whether they have been used before and if so since when was the last iteratrion. If the AI runs out of names it could scan the database search for ship names which were used but now obselete because the ship was destroyed and then look at a time stamp to pick the oldest one.

Might work i suppose.

Agreed. This is perhaps the most important thing regarding ship names. An absolute must.

I agree. The first ship of a class should be named after that class. It's flavorful and custom for pretty much every empire as far as I know.

However, afterwards, I don't see why you couldn't name all your ships the same if you so wish. Personally, I don't really pay attention to ship names in BotF1 except maybe to scroll through them all and find the one that the game names "Enterprise" and "Defiant" (screw Voyager, heh).

If you want to name them all Spot after your dog, I don't see the harm in it. If you want to add the alphabet to the end of it, you can do that too... but you don't have to. *shrugs* This is probably the most minor of all details in the game so... whatever :p

Agreed. The game should allow you to name the ships whatever you want.

Oh yaeh.. In all space-empire sims I allways have Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Omega fleets

The Omega and being the meanest mother****. alltough I sometimes name them Delta Force or Apocalypse Fleet