It's time to play.... NAME - THAT - STAR

[Strager]

Thank you.... Thank you everyone..... Today we are here to play.... Name That Star....

In Stellaris today Stars are given names when the Galaxy are born, and they stay the way they are until the great Monkey in the sky decides to delete our file.

Instead - what should happen is that every star should be given a number at creation. When you discover a star you name it (an event is fired for players allowing them to choose a name or use a random one from their name list)

So what happens when two empires name the same star? Until they meet they keep their existing names. After they meet, if a star is in the other empires borders it gets their name automatically - if it is in Neutral space it gets the name of the first one to discover it.

This would lead to more varied galaxies in the long term as more nameslists are added. Clusters of names would show up based on the empires choices of names.

This could also open up some neat things - that empire of sentient machines might rename all of their systems in binary for example....

 

[GamerSteve]

I already rename all stars after I colonize them. I used to use taxonomically relevant names, so my whale-based Cetan empire, had stars named things like Delphinus, with the planet Delphis (Delphinus delphis is the common dolphin), or Physeter star, with planet Catodon (sperm whale, Physeter catodon). But that became onerous when the empire grew large.

In more recent games I have picked a star prefix, and then added it to the star. So my Che'tan empire of Cheetah cat people, all their stars were Che'something. So, Che'Tau Ceti, Che'Eridani, etc.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

I've always felt stars should get named by the first person to see them using an appropriate star-based name list, yeah.

 

[Drakonn]

Could even use the species names list for that. Then, you'll know when you've crossed into someone else's territory because the star names all suddenly become variations R'rruk'Rruu'.

 

[Mitchz95]

While this sounds awesome from an RP perspective, I'm not sure it would really add enough to be worth the time to program.

First of all, considering just how many stars there are out there, even if you pass on naming 90% of them there's still going to be a lot of pop-ups that will grow annoying pretty quickly. I can see newcomers being turned off the game by the constant "Would you like to name this star?" events. Especially if they're running multiple science vessels.

Secondly, if the number changes to a name the moment you enter the system, what's the point of having the number at all?

Finally, stars within our borders can already be re-named at will so this is sort of in the game already. I usually just name them after their colonies so I can keep track of them at a glance from the galaxy screen.