Names

so... a big part of a game like GalCiv is customizability, and along those lines one detail that is very distant fron strategy and not very hard to achieve technically, that is names. and its something very near and dear to my heart.

one of my biggest peevs with GalCiv1 was that you couldn't rename a planet individually. it also bugged me that the sol system had five planets: earth, mars, saturn, and sol iv/v. maybe it's too much to ask for a completely accurate sol system. but there's larger stakes i'm aiming at here. all the planets in the home systems of the major (and maybe even 'minor') races could have individual and unique names. planets with primitive native populations, ancient ruins, or other quirks could have individual names. and finally, the player (and hell, maybe even AI) could give planets new custom names.

but it goes farther: ships. one of my favorite things about SMAC was that you could name the custom units; and i thought it was a great detail that you could name individual units in CIV3. it was a fair conceit in MOO2 that you could choose names for each unit class from lists that were different for each race, but better than nothing. i think overall, SMAC had the best variety of default names with posibilities to customize, but the default names were horrible. MOO2 names were pretty cool, but I think GalCiv could stand out a bit by having completely foriegn-sounding names for different species.

though it could be a lot to leave all up the player without defaults. coming up with a ready database of names is probably an easier way to handle it, technically speaking, but as a thought, perhaps a name generator (especially for alien names and worlds) could help ease the game's scalability without running out of names in the database. maybe reserve recognizable words for super simple ships (colony, scout, etc.), but use generators that create names from algorithms that would create syllables. creating a different algorithm for each race could add greatly to their uniqueness and feel. perhaps the human home system should be randomized (other'n earth) from a list of the real planets, and units from a list of english words (same way jet types are named)...

and maybe even unique names and name lists for especially large ships. that could be just another layer.

i think the way planets are being handled is looking pretty great for GalCiv2. i wonder if a planet's graphic appearance will change and the planet is terraformed (or polluted, if that concept exists in GalCiv2), and especially as it is populated, industrialized and urbanized... another spot for names: cities. dense population areas could get city names. but that might be a bit too much to ask for.

anyway, these are just some thoughts. this is the kind of thing that really makes military and expansionistic micro management a bit more fun, for me at least.