[Barnacle Bill]

There is what I do now, and what I wish the game had a feature to let me do.

What I do now is to name the class using a naming convention which is in three parts: a type designator, a name & a Roman numeral.

The type designator for warships is ES, FF, DD, CL, CA, BC, BB, DN & SD (I like calling Baseships "Superdreadnoughts"). For carriers I use CVL, CV & CVA. For anything not a warship I use a three letter designator beginning with A (for Auxilliary, following USN practice). For example small, medium & large transports are AKS, AKM & AKL, respectively. Mostly after the A comes something to remind me what the ship is for, for example AML is a mine layer.

For the class name I have a set of them I like to use over & over for ships of a given type. For example, by my great uncle was a Chief Petty Officer on a minesweeper in WWII, so I always name my minesweeper class Hobson after him.

The Roman numerals are assigned sequentially as I retrofit the class. I tend to do that when I have the tech to add 1 to the ship's speed. If I have an upgrade which does not increase speed, I'll append a lower case letter after the Roman numeral.

For individual ships, I just let the program append those 4 digit sequential numbers to the class name. The exception is CVA's, since I don't build very many of them. They get individual names, generally after real world carriers.

What I wish the game would do is let me specify a separate name file for each class when I design the class. The way this would work is every time you build a ship of that class it will use the next name in the file - falling back on the current class name plus 4 digit number if it runs out of names in the file. Then I'd go through the trouble to create the files for all my standard classes once and use them over & over.



[This message has been edited by Barnacle Bill (edited 19 May 2001).]