About planet names

[Varus90]

My apologies if this has been mentioned before, haven't been paying much attention to this forum, but I have noticed the screenshots for the dev diaries following the standard '[Star name] [Roman numeral]' format for new planets.

Now, when that happens in other 4X space games, it makes sense for it to be used in uninhabited systems, but when it happens with the planets in a species' home system, then I find it a bit odd. My idea is that every planet and possibly celestial object in your species' home system should have a unique randomly generated name in line with the type of species and culture, although of course all planets' names should be customizable. In fact, all home systems and maybe colonized ones as well should have them--Mass Effect is a good example, as generally all the planets that sapients care about as more than a resource source are given unique names.

Especially interesting is the potential for colonialist name-changes, maybe even automatic if you have an autocratic government type, where you could have 'Earth' changed to 'Sol III' or 'Pekopon' or what have you upon conquest via popup option to change it, with its original name only changing back if it manages to revolt back to its previous owners (or you change it yourself).

 

[Tim_Ward]

I can't find the post where a dev said this now, but I believe colony names will be alongside leader and ship names in the name lists that each empire uses.

 

[Velorian]

I can't find the post where a dev said this now, but I believe colony names will be alongside leader and ship names in the name lists that each empire uses.

I think he means that a home system of a race would have names for all the inhabitable planets as well, not just colonies. If they have an equivalent to Mars it should have some sort of name.

 

[aitaituo]

Surely you are not saying it's silly for a foreign monarch to refer to himself as, "Lrrr, Ruler of the Planet Omicron Persei VIII!"?

 

[Trentest0]

I really kinda never liked the "System name - Roman Numeral" naming convention in sci-fi...

I DO like how Mass Effect did it though. Planets that are basically past the point of being outposts or barren wastelands and have populations in the tens of millions have official names, while planets that are still being explored or planets not worthy of attention follow the "system name - numeral" naming convention.

I hope that there's an option to rename every celestial body in the universe like in Spore. :3

 

[aitaituo]

I DO like how Mass Effect did it though. Planets that are basically past the point of being outposts or barren wastelands and have populations in the tens of millions have official names, while planets that are still being explored or planets not worthy of attention follow the "system name - numeral" naming convention.

That's certainly the most realistic way of doing it. The uninhabited or basically uninhabited locations in the galaxy are going to outnumber the inhabited places for hundreds of millions of years, if not forever. It makes more sense to name them something logical and systematic, like Stargates P3X(...) names that are shorthand coordinates and leave illogical names for the relatively few places worth going on a regular basis.

 

[EU3NOOB]

'Earth' changed to 'Sol III'

Tosev III, stupid Tosevite!

 

[Kashked]

It got especially silly in Distant Worlds: Universe when an empire spawned in an unnamed starsystem. Then you would have the GLX459 confederacy and the Astarus 3 Dominion and all sorts of stupidly named empires (empires were named for their home star system).

 

[Botox]

I really kinda never liked the "System name - Roman Numeral" naming convention in sci-fi...

I DO like how Mass Effect did it though. Planets that are basically past the point of being outposts or barren wastelands and have populations in the tens of millions have official names, while planets that are still being explored or planets not worthy of attention follow the "system name - numeral" naming convention.

I hope that there's an option to rename every celestial body in the universe like in Spore. :3

While I dont see the big difference between Roman Numeral or just Numeral naming systems, I agree that in the ME Universe did it quite nice.

Concerning the naming of starting systems it could be a bit difficult to give all planets in a starting system unique names.
Consider that every starting position will be generated random (at least I think so), so the number of planets in each system is random aswell. So unless we have a list of... well MORE planet names for each type of race from which the game can chose a couple random names for the starting system planets it will get a bit messy...
Imagine that you start with 30 races from the beginning.
Each starting system has about 6 planets (plus/minus 2). And every planet has about 2 moons (larger have more, smaller have less, so I just say 2 for each).
That would be 30 unique system names, 180 unique planet names and 360 unique moon names... just for the start and they better dont come up twice.

I dont know how diffucult it would be to implement such a feature but I wouldnt care much if they just give the starting world a unique name and let the player chose names for planets that are under his jurisdiction (not only under control/with a colony!).

 

[Tim_Ward]

Not as silly as all that - alien languages would probably be mutually unpronounceable, so the names you see in game might just be your empires names for that species/polity, not what they call themselves.

It's not unprecedented thing even here on Earth:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_reporting_name

 

[Kashked]

Not as silly as all that - alien languages would probably be mutually unpronounceable, so the names you see in game might just be your empires names for that species/polity, not what they call themselves.

It's not unprecedented thing even here on Earth:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_reporting_name

Heh, I'll grant you that it might be reasonable, after a fashion, but I still don't like it. Even better examples for your point would probably be nation names actually. Plenty of countries have wildly different names from their native languages in other languages, and english is kind of the stand-in for whatever language your race speaks. Meh, like I said, I still don't like it.

 

[Varus90]

Tosev III, stupid Tosevite!

Say the guys who haven't moved past DVD players and guided missiles in millennia!

I think he means that a home system of a race would have names for all the inhabitable planets as well, not just colonies. If they have an equivalent to Mars it should have some sort of name.

Yep, that's what I meant. I know it might be tricky, but it really adds to the immersion when you see hints like that that the pops and species are more than just numbers and maybe a portrait, that they have their own backstory and mythology, and so on.

 

[Velorian]

Not as silly as all that - alien languages would probably be mutually unpronounceable, so the names you see in game might just be your empires names for that species/polity, not what they call themselves.

It's not unprecedented thing even here on Earth:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_reporting_name

Sure, but as long as they are named something other than [Star System][Nr] at least for all homeworld systems that's much better. You can reason that they were renamed to something close to what you can pronounce or given a ridiculous name by one of your explorers, but they shouldn't just have a number. Presumably each planet in such a system has a millennia old historic tie to that civilization like we have with Mars, Venus, etc.

Their names doesn't have to make much sense, for some of the empires shown in the screenshots, names like Ix'Pe, Ix'Ye, Su'Tar etc are just fine. It should be easy enough to get a lot of random names by combining syllables.

For systems discovered during explorations I'm completely fine with adding numerals to planets, as long as colonized worlds gets a name.

 

[EU3NOOB]

Say the guys who haven't moved past DVD players and guided missiles in millennia!


Yep, that's what I meant. I know it might be tricky, but it really adds to the immersion when you see hints like that that the pops and species are more than just numbers and maybe a portrait, that they have their own backstory and mythology, and so on.

Say that to our glorious Emperor's *looks down in reverence* face... oh wait-- you can't, stupid Tosevite!!

 

[Aleks S. I]

In one of the Dev diaries (the one that showed race creation) there was a choice for "name lists" or something like that. In the example shown they were using "Arthropoid 1" (if I recall correctly) which gave names like "Ix'hasdjhdfsla" (it wasn't actually keyboard spam, but I couldn't be bothered to go find what it actually said. I just remember the Ix' part. ) so hopefully included in this will be a handful of unique names for planets in the home system. Also I imagine that planet (or even star?) names will be something you can customize, so if you start to get a feel for how your empire names things you could just mimic it yourself.

 

[henzington]

I imagine it would be similar to the new system to name province in the random new world for EU4.