For the love of iluluaulsuauu,, hwo do you pronounce that last word?

[loodwig]

So this is definitely not a bug, but one of my minor gripes with moo3 is the auto-name it gives to AI controlled empires. I'm playing through the fourth game in a series with some friends, allied victory and all that fun business. Over skype or in the room, we often are coordinating things like "I'm thinking of invading HQ-GSDFH89-827" to which an appropriate response should be "sounds good, I'll send an armada to support," or perhaps "Wait, no, I have a defensive alliance with those guys... can you hold off for a few turns?" Instead the response goes something like "Uh, which race is that?" Arguably, this is easier with the cybernetic races, as the other races are a strange mixture of vowels and consonants that make pronunciation or comprehension a decidedly non-trivial feat. So my thought would be that I'd modify some spreadsheet somewhere to change the available names of the various empires such that they could be distinguishable and intelligible. I appreciate the flavor of unique emperor names, but practically speaking I'd be happier saying "We're gonna go kill Fred now," instead of trying to pronounce the name of the Evon emperor.

Here's my issue though : I've found no such spreadsheet containing a collection of emperor names. I've found spy names and leader names, but not the random baby talk for emperors. I'm wondering if the emperor names are just that : a collection of random characters generated by a built-in game function limited by some algorithm. If that's the case, has anyone found an environment where the save game editor works so that I might modify these guys after the fact? Given the duration of a typical moo3 campaign, it would be worth it to me to get everyone online, pick our races, run a round, save & quit, modify the save, and get everyone back online again.

Indeed, this would make scenario generation a fun concept as well... something I've thought about doing for a few years now.

[Dymoon]

There's a way with the save-game editor, but it's gonna bug your game. You need to use either the original racemodifiers or at least a modified version that has the same picks with other costs or bonuses. Changes to the race bonuses work too.

After you change this spreadsheet you can edit the empires names with only the 5.2 savegame editor, 5.1 seems to error .

Now the bad part: your empire and maybe the other empires will lose their flag and get a completely black one. Basically you won't see those pop-ups with the flags and the signs if it has an mobilization center when you press B. It's not fatal though and it won't crash the game.

The editor doesn't get support anymore so I doubt this bug will be fixed.

This post has been edited by Dymoon on Jun 8 2012, 07:56 PM

[loodwig]

Wow. Faced with an annoying feature or an buggy solution, I'm not sure which I prefer. I don't suppose the author of the save game editor has the source code available anywhere? At the very least, thanks for confirming what I feared, so I don't go mad looking for a spreadsheet that doesn't exist :)

[Dymoon]

It's Bhruic the one that did it and from what i read in the atari forums, he found the developers annotations in the mac version of the game and used those to make the patches and the editor.

I don't know how he got to the source or did any of the patches expect these thing i'm just citing, cause I'm not a programmer.

About the Spredsheet edit i just found it right now. It's really is the wsleader the one you looked for. It seems it has a dual role and it has algorithms for scrambling the names. I deleted all names and replaced them with Adam, and started an 16 players game and it didn't start but with 1 empire it started and it was named Adam. So I guess you just need to change them to Fred, Fishy, Squid or anything you like and they will work.

I personally like the names though, I like their flavor.

This post has been edited by Dymoon on Jun 8 2012, 10:17 PM

[loodwig]

To an extent I like the names too, but I'd like to remove some of the harder to pronounce ones. Amazing find; you are a Godsend. With the blessings of this site I'll post my updated list of leader names. Thank you again!

[Dymoon]

Np, it was interesting to find out how the empires are named.

[loodwig]

Just so others reading this know, it's

Master of Orion 3\GameDataSets\Classic_01\GameData\Common\MiscText\wsLeaderNames.txt

There's another file elsewhere called wsLeaderNames (it sets the actual leaders that will join you during the game, and it's quite confusing :).

Here's what I learned about that file :

- There are reserved words (Shepherd, John & Grendel crashed the game).
- There still appears to be a randomizing factor on certain names, even if you set each last name to a single name. If you add more last names per race, you get more random last names.
- The first names appear entirely unused, except for psilons, who only use first name.
- You cannot remove or change prefixes or suffixes of the individual races without crashing the game.
- You can turn off the suffix for first and last names, though I didn't notice much of a difference.
- You cannot rename the New Orions (at least not here).


So what I could effectively do is fix the random names to a set list, so that you could chose your opponent's name for every game with about 80% accuracy (Vorlon becomes Vorlor sometimes, etc). This, so far, has only worked for me with 15 player games and only when using the race modifier (included in Vanilla and Strawberry) that forces diversity. TBH, I haven't tested it without it though.