custom star names

from Stardock Forums

How do I customize star names in Galactic Civilizations III?  Ideally, I would like to use real star names if possible.  I tried altering

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Galactic Civilizations III\data\English\Text\StarNamesText.xml

but that did not seem to work, even when I copied the altered file to

C:\Users\Nicole\Documents\My Games\GC3Crusade\Mods\English\Text\StarNamesText.xml

For testing, I just did a simple find-and-replace on KATE to replace "<String>" with "<String>X " (X followed by space followed by default star name).  Unfortunately, none of the stars generated seemed to have the new altered names.

I noticed however that some stars appear in the game that do not appear in <StarNamesText.xml>, such as "Assembly."  So it appears that Galactic Civilizations III is getting the star names from somewhere else?

I have Galactic Civilizations III Gold with all expansions and DLC (just purchased a few days ago during the Steam summer sale) on 64-bit Microsoft Windows 10 Enterprise.

27,209 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

D'oh.  You have to click "enable mods" in the options.  It works!  :-)

But where did the star names like "Assembly" come from if they are not listed in <StarNamesText.xml>?

If I only wanted to use real star names, would stars like "Assembly" still show up on some maps?

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Also, instead of replacing each of the 3789 default star names with my own custom star names, what would happen if I only replace say 100 of the default star names with new custom star names and then delete the remaining 3689 star names?  If a map is generated with more than 100 stars in that case, would some of the stars have duplicate names, or does Galactic Civilizations III have a system in place to prevent that (e.g. suffixing a number or letter to duplicated names)?  What is the maximum number of stars for a computer-generated map?

Galactic Civilizations IV
Reply #3 from Stardock.net Forums Top

Nicole, please don't create multiple posts one after the other like that, you can always edit a previous post to add to it.

I am not sure but I believe there is some level of generation to compensate for more stars than are in the list. Though I am not as familiar with the way GC3's engine works.