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The title of the thread pretty much says what this is.

While the mod itself is simple and doesn't alter actual gameplay, it was a massive effort to compile all of these names and then type them all in (my fingers are still throbbing)! There are well over 10,000 names (destroyers alone have 2,919 names). Some of you may have seen this same mod posted elsewhere but I've changed a few things in this version.

What's in this mod?
Essentially the name of every warship from every navy around the world encompassing the pre-dreadnaughts right on up to ships that haven't even had their keels laid yet. Also included are the names of hypothetical ships (if known) and ships that were planned but never built. Obviously, with a compilation of this size, some ships have fallen through the cracks, but I'm aware of them and will add them eventually. For instance, the smaller WWII navies aren't included yet, nor did I include smaller vessels like WWII minehunters and destroyer escorts (though I might add those later).

What can I use this for?
For people who really really really like immersion, this mod would only be good for playing the humans. I envisioned a naming convention similar to Star Trek whereby humanity would have a fleet named after the seaborne ships of old, and those names would represent all nationalities. BUT, because many of those ships are named after prominent leaders and well-known places, using this mod for a non-human race would probably break immersion. After all, it's unlikely that an alien race would name one of its carriers after Ronald Reagan or George Washington.

How are the names assigned?
Escorts are named after small combat vessels, namely fast attack craft (PCFG) and corvettes (FSG, FFL).

Frigates are named after, well ... frigates.

Destroyers are named after ... you guessed it. Destroyers. This includes the old four-stack destroyers of WWI up to and including the ultra-modern destroyers of the 21st Century.

Cruisers are primarily named after the armored cruisers of WWI and the light and heavy cruisers of WWII. There are few modern ships classified as cruisers, but they are included too. The Soviet cold war cruisers as well as the Aegis Ticonderoga/Bunker Hill classes are here. Even the Russian Kirov CGNs are included, plus the French Colbert and Jeanne D'Arc cruisers, too. Now, during WWII, the USN named its cruisers after cities but today, the LA class nuclear subs carry names of cities. So... I decided to keep US city names in the cruisers list.

Capital Ships are named after pre-dreadnaughts, dreadnaughts, battlecruisers and battleships. However, even when including WWI, there just weren't enough of these, so I decided to include modern submarine names here, too (SSK, SSN, SSBN, SSGN). Yet even that didn't produce enough names, so in this category only, I reached all the way back to the Age of Sail and included the names of ships-of-the-line.

Carriers are named after all types of carriers from seaplane tenders to the nuclear supercarriers of the USN. Escort carriers, "jeep" carriers, "harrier carriers," and ASW carriers are all included, as well as carriers that never quite made it out of dry dock (e.g. the Kriegmarine's Graf Zeppelin and the Regia Marina's Aquila).

Exploration Ships are named after famous explorers - thus a good number of them will be Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch.

Resort Bases are named after popular resorts and vacation spots here on earth. Sorry, no "Disney Base" because I couldn't afford their licensing fees. [;)]

Passenger Ships are named after various passenger-carrying cruise liners. I plan to go back to this category later and add the old trans-Atlantic steamers of the early 20th Century (e.g. SS Titanic)

Working Ships (i.e. freighters, construction ships)are named after all kinds of real-world ships - container ships, oil tankers, cargo vessels, military support ships (AO, AS, T-AKE, etc.)and many more.

Troop Transports are named after amphibious assault ships, landing ships, floating "docks" and similar ships (AOE, LST, LHA, LSD, LPD, etc)

Further notes on naming conventions: Some ships belonged to more than one navy and thus had more than one name. In this event, all of the names a ship had are included. For example, the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano was once the USS Phoenix, so both names are included in the cruiser category.

Are there duplicate names? I tried my best to keep this at a minimum, but in a compilation of this size, it's simply impossible to verify if each name has already been used. This is a real pain for the USN and RN because names can cross-polinate between navies. However, some names were left duplicated on purpose if the same name was represented in more than one ship category. For instance, the Queen Elizabeth was both a battleship (capital ship) and a carrier, so I left the name in both categories. Given the number of names, it's unlikely that both names will turn up at the same time.

A note for the developers: What would be super awesome is for the game to be able to randomize ship names so that each playthrough doesn't use the same names in the same order - similar to the way in which character names are randomly generated.

Barring that, being able to list the names in a column (like system names) instead of a big long continuous line would allow people to manually randomize their ship lists with a minimum of effort. That way a person could simply cut their list of ship names, plug them into a list randomizer, copy the results, and paste the new list back into the game.

Changes since last version: Added the large cruise liners to passenger ship names. Added Russian pre-revolution battleships. Added names to construction ships.

See post #18 for a list of colony names to download.

Download link is way down there at the bottom of the post (for some weird reason)

Fantastic thanks!!! [&o]

This is great! Is there no way to code the game to randomly choose a name from the list? After a few games, the first names are getting old and predictable! [:(]

Thanks! There are a huge amount of ship names in there. Kudos.

Might be good to expand the list back further into the Age of Sail, making adjustments for eras (Frigates can be confusing because of the changing nature of their role and what exactly was being called a frigate).

One thing to note is the near complete breakdown in naming conventions in the modern United States Navy. Now pretty much anything can be named anything and that means more and more things being named after politicians...

For that that would be:

Escorts are named after small combat vessels, namely fast attack craft (PCFG) and corvettes (FSG, FFL).

Good to include lesser ships like brigs and sloops, bomb ketches.

Frigates are named after, well ... frigates.

These would be lumped in with the above, modern frigates are essentially what destroyers were in the first half the last century.

Destroyers are named after ... you guessed it. Destroyers. This includes the old four-stack destroyers of WWI up to and including the ultra-modern destroyers of the 21st Century.

Beyond the USN, this would hold true with the above, only with destroyers now being named after conventions previously used by cruisers.

Cruisers are primarily named after the armored cruisers of WWI and the light and heavy cruisers of WWII. There are few modern ships classified as cruisers, but they are included too. The Soviet cold war cruisers as well as the Aegis Ticonderoga/Bunker Hill classes are here. Even the Russian Kirov CGNs are included, plus the French Colbert and Jeanne D'Arc cruisers, too. Now, during WWII, the USN named its cruisers after cities but today, the LA class nuclear subs carry names of cities. So... I decided to keep US city names in the cruisers list.

For the Age of Sail, one can throw in sail frigates into this category.

Capital Ships are named after pre-dreadnaughts, dreadnaughts, battlecruisers and battleships. However, even when including WWI, there just weren't enough of these, so I decided to include modern submarine names here, too (SSK, SSN, SSBN, SSGN). Yet even that didn't produce enough names, so in this category only, I reached all the way back to the Age of Sail and included the names of ships-of-the-line.

I'd ditch most SSKs and sub names as they're often hold overs from cruisers (the 688s being named after cities) and the old days of fish names.

I'd include some carrier names as they were often taken from old battleships in the case of RN carriers, older ships and battles which played a key part in the USN and America history (like Lexington, Saratoga, Ranger, Enterprise) but they can be maybe mixed with carrier names).

Carriers are named after all types of carriers from seaplane tenders to the nuclear supercarriers of the USN. Escort carriers, "jeep" carriers, "harrier carriers," and ASW carriers are all included, as well as carriers that never quite made it out of dry dock (e.g. the Kriegmarine's Graf Zeppelin and the Regia Marina's Aquila).

Exploration Ships are named after famous explorers - thus a good number of them will be Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch.

Would be good to include many exploration ship names in this category both from ships and from spacecraft, a convention already used by NASA (Challenger, Endeavour, Discovery being shuttles named after previous naval exploration vessels). Along with that would be lesser known names like Erebus and Terror, old bomb ketches that became exploration ships due tot heir shallow draft, themselves coming from the RN convention of naming bomb ketches after "hellish" or fiery things.

Along with that would be integrating space age exploration, like Voyager, Viking, Mariner, Venera, Cassini, etc.

Troop Transports are named after amphibious assault ships, landing ships, floating "docks" and similar ships (AOE, LST, LHA, LSD, LPD, etc)

Maybe stick to the older names which reflected their relationship to the Marine Corp in the USN for instance, like the Iwo Jima and Tarawa classes while keeping the others for capital ships and carrier like the Wasp and America classes.

ORIGINAL: FireLion1983

This is great! Is there no way to code the game to randomly choose a name from the list? After a few games, the first names are getting old and predictable! [:(]

Unfortunately, no, and I tried messing around a bit to see if I could devise a way to do it. Failing that, I thought I could get away with listing the ships in column form (like system name lists) but that didn't work because you need a ship name immediately following the ship category (i.e. CapitalShip: Enterprise).

So I put the first ship name immediately following the category, but when I did that, the game selected only the first name over and over.

By putting it in column form, people could at least cut 'n paste entire lists and plug them into a list randomizer (which is what I used to randomize the names). You can still do that, but it takes a VERY long time to convert lines of ship names into a column of ship names, put them through the randomizer, and then revert the entire compilation back to lines of ship names. Trust me, that's what I did, and I swear I'll never see straight again. [X(]

But if you're interested in messing with it, here's a link to a good randomizer. The list randomizer is a bit down the page but you'll see it.

http://www.random.org/

Howdy, Beastro,

Might be good to expand the list back further into the Age of Sail, making adjustments for eras (Frigates can be confusing because of the changing nature of their role and what exactly was being called a frigate).

Yeah, I thought about going back to the Age of Sail, but two things stopped me. The first was that I didn't want the multi-national feel of the names list to be saturated with British, French, and Spanish names. Those three nations were so very dominant with a few other navies (Dutch, Swiss, and Russia), but Asia would have been left out completely as would Australia and the entire Western Hemisphere (the USA only built frigates, and many of those names were re-used later on).

The second reason is just how big the list already is. Now, if the game chose random names from the list - or if it was easy to cut 'n paste lists to run them through a randomizer, I'd keep adding more and more names as I found them. But because of the way the naming works, it's highly unlikely anyone is going to run out of names unless you engage in a really really really protracted war. Besides, I think the game reuses names if a ship is destroyed, which I don't like.

For instance, if a cruiser named Enterprise is destroyed, the next cruiser you build will be named Enterprise. I'll have to pay more attention to that. I remember I thought I would add a prefix to my ships, like USS, but if I built a cruiser and named it USS Enterprise, the game would realize, "Hey, there's no ship named Enterprise anymore" and name the next cruiser Enterprise.

One thing to note is the near complete breakdown in naming conventions in the modern United States Navy. Now pretty much anything can be named anything and that means more and more things being named after politicians...

The USN is a royal P.I.T.A. because not only do they like to reuse names, they won't reuse the name for the same class of ship. Thus you have WWII light and heavy cruisers being named after cities ... as well as the Los Angeles class SSN. So I had to make a few judgment calls. I figured ships named for cities should be in the cruiser category because a lot of naval buffs are intimately familiar with WWII ships - probably more so than modern ships (since they haven't seen combat).

I'd ditch most SSKs and sub names as they're often hold overs from cruisers (the 688s being named after cities) and the old days of fish names.

For the USN names, that's what I did. Modern subs are named after cities and states. I kept the city names in the cruisers category, and since state names would represent battleships and subs anyway, I kept those in the capital ship category. I didn't think fish names were appropriate for a space setting, so I didn't use those, either. Heh, maybe instead of fish names, I could have used names like USS Giant Kaltor. Heh heh heh.

I'd include some carrier names as they were often taken from old battleships in the case of RN carriers, older ships and battles which played a key part in the USN and America history (like Lexington, Saratoga, Ranger, Enterprise) but they can be maybe mixed with carrier names).

Surprisingly enough, there weren't too many overlaps with carrier names. The early Aegis CGs were named after Revolutionary War battles, but I think there are only five of those, the only names that overlapped with carriers. The later cruisers were named for Civil War battles with a smattering of battles from other wars (Anzio, Lake Erie, etc.) Since modern carriers were named after presidents and politicians (except for Kitty Hawk, Constellation, Independence, Ranger, Enterprise, Nimitz), WWII carriers tended to be named after Revolutionary War battles and Revolutionary War personalities. All except Shangri-La which was a sort-of joke referencing the Doolittle Raid. I suppose if you want to get technical, the two WWII carriers Lexington and Saratoga were laid down as battlecruisers but were changed to carriers due to the limitations of the Washington Naval Treaty. But nah, I decided not to get technical.

Along with that would be integrating space age exploration, like Voyager, Viking, Mariner, Venera, Cassini, etc.

This is a really good idea, a real head-smacking, "Why didn't I think of that?" idea. So yeah, I'll update this soon and include modern probes, shuttles, and some scientists too. We need some ships named Albert Einstein, Steven Hawking, and Michio Kaku.

Maybe stick to the older names which reflected their relationship to the Marine Corp in the USN for instance, like the Iwo Jima and Tarawa classes while keeping the others for capital ships and carrier like the Wasp and America classes.

I can't remember where I put the name Wasp. I know it's an LHA now and a bad carrier design during WWII (that's what you get when you try to cut corners). Iwo Jima, Tarawa, Newport, and others are included in Troop Transports. I really wasn't sure how many of those people usually build in a game, but when you include all of the other nation's amphibious assets, there's a lot of them. Capital ships I think have enough names for the time being, but if ever a time comes when the game randomizes ship names, I might restructure the list.

Thanks for the feedback. [8D]

Awesome work, especially for civilian ships! The names diversity is stunning.

ORIGINAL: Hannable

Howdy, Beastro,

Yeah, I thought about going back to the Age of Sail, but two things stopped me. The first was that I didn't want the multi-national feel of the names list to be saturated with British, French, and Spanish names. Those three nations were so very dominant with a few other navies (Dutch, Swiss, and Russia), but Asia would have been left out completely as would Australia and the entire Western Hemisphere (the USA only built frigates, and many of those names were re-used later on).

By Swiss I assume you meant Swedes since Switzerland is hardly in a position to have ever had a navy, well, one beyond Lake Geneva.

I could see avoiding that because of of being swamped by Western names in general. The three navies you listed did dominate the era, but there were plenty of other navies for names, though fortunately many can be eliminated since they overlapped (like mythological, Roman deity names).

For Far Eastern names I'd recommend looking up the 19th Century Japanese navy, they used many names when they were starting out that they never reused.

The US like-wise used a lot of names mid that century that they no longer employ, mostly ones named after river.

The USN is a royal P.I.T.A. because not only do they like to reuse names, they won't reuse the name for the same class of ship. Thus you have WWII light and heavy cruisers being named after cities ... as well as the Los Angeles class SSN. So I had to make a few judgment calls. I figured ships named for cities should be in the cruiser category because a lot of naval buffs are intimately familiar with WWII ships - probably more so than modern ships (since they haven't seen combat).

Thank the politicization of the naming process. As Riverover once said "Fish don't vote".

Surprisingly enough, there weren't too many overlaps with carrier names. The early Aegis CGs were named after Revolutionary War battles, but I think there are only five of those, the only names that overlapped with carriers. The later cruisers were named for Civil War battles with a smattering of battles from other wars (Anzio, Lake Erie, etc.) Since modern carriers were named after presidents and politicians (except for Kitty Hawk, Constellation, Independence, Ranger, Enterprise, Nimitz), WWII carriers tended to be named after Revolutionary War battles and Revolutionary War personalities. All except Shangri-La which was a sort-of joke referencing the Doolittle Raid. I suppose if you want to get technical, the two WWII carriers Lexington and Saratoga were laid down as battlecruisers but were changed to carriers due to the limitations of the Washington Naval Treaty. But nah, I decided not to get technical.

The lack of overlap comes form the fact that Carrier naming traditions come from important battles in America's history and ship names from the early days of the USN with the only real breaks being names tied to US aviation history (Kitty Hawk and Langley). The tradition seems to most likely be inherited from the Lexington conversions (All named after traditional warships) since USS Langley was the only ship which came before them and was named after an aviation pioneer.

The Ticos inherited the carrier naming tradition of battles because cruisers lost their names to sub when fish got screwed even though the Ticos were just big destroyers (See the names of the previous classes of US missile "cruisers" and "frigates" that preceded the cruisers that were converted to carry missiles).

I can't remember where I put the name Wasp. I know it's an LHA now and a bad carrier design during WWII (that's what you get when you try to cut corners). Iwo Jima, Tarawa, Newport, and others are included in Troop Transports. I really wasn't sure how many of those people usually build in a game, but when you include all of the other nation's amphibious assets, there's a lot of them. Capital ships I think have enough names for the time being, but if ever a time comes when the game randomizes ship names, I might restructure the list.

Wasp originally was a schooner from the War of Independence and the name of several ships which served in 1812. Likewise others were as well mixing the two traditions together like Saratoga which was no only a battle but was the flagship of the US Lake Champlain squadron during the Battle of Plattsburgh

Thanks for the feedback.

You're welcome.

This is awesome! Thank you.

THAT'S ABSOLUTELY AWESOME!! Previous names were actually quite silly to me, but with these new ship names the game looks much more realistic. Also it's good to see(finally) some old italian ships names like: Legionario or Re D'Italia. You must have done a hell of a research to get this mod done! Really awesome job, thanksssss [:)]

You're very much welcome.

I do plan to add more things to the name list. For instance, I'm working on an extended list for civilian vessels, especially freighters, as I've noticed even a medium-sized empire can burn through all of the names I've included.

Plus I plan to add the names of famous scientists to exploration ship names.

I'll probably occasionally post lists that have been re-randomized so you'll get new names that are too far back in the list to ever see the light of day.

(One thing that irks me is that the game will re-use names of ships that have been destroyed, further lessening the number of names you'll actually see in the game).

I also have a colony name list that I'm going to post shortly.

Happy 4x-ing.

Anyway to get the game use these in a pre-existing saved game?

Fantastic!!! Thank you.

Where are you going to take the freighters names from? Are you going to make new names for starbases as well? Colony names really?? Cool!

Great work! Much obliged.

ORIGINAL: Beastro

Anyway to get the game use these in a pre-existing saved game?

I haven't tested it in a pre-existing saved game, but I would imagine it would just begin naming all new ships built with my list. I doubt very much it would rename all existing ships in your game.

ORIGINAL: TheTrooper

Where are you going to take the freighters names from? Are you going to make new names for starbases as well? Colony names really?? Cool!

Right now starbases are named for earth cities, but not always the biggest cities as they are well used and obvious, so some smaller cities have been used for starbase names.

Again, though, my list is best used for the human faction - though nothing stops you from using the list with any race. It's just that a lot of ship and base names are very human-specific (after all, we really don't know how the other races would name their ships. I guess other race-specific ship lists could be made, but probably wouldn't have as many entries.)

Freighter names are taken from a website that tracks most of the civilian shipping traffic going on in the world. Each individual freighter, cargo ship, container ship, tanker, tug, dredger, some fishing vessels, some cruise ships, etc. etc. are listed by name. There are thousands of them. So I just add some of those to the freighter list.

Here's a list of colony names. I decided to hold to real-world planetary naming conventions and used the names of gods, heroes, and mythological creatures found in several different cultures including Rome, Greece, Babylon, China, Japan, Finland, Canaanite, and a slew of others.

There are close to 1,000 names.

Plus, the names are in column form, which means you can copy/paste the names as-is into a randomizer, generate a new random list, and then copy/paste the new list back to the text file in the game - for a completely different naming order.

The randomizer I use is: http://www.random.org/

Note: When you plug the names into the randomizer, it will generate a numbered list. Don't worry, you can copy the entire list, numbers and all, and paste it back to the text file without issue. The numbers will NOT appear in the text file when you paste the list.

Man i used your list, and must admit that i really found the game to get a more realistic saviour. Now that my ships and colonies are all named after Earth ships and cities, it really looks like that humanity is really into space, not that some sort of humans from an unknown planet are wondering around. By this mod things look mmm familiar? thank you again!