Originally Posted by frau kaleun

Merchant ships are not really an issue as the ShipNames file generally provides enough names to account for far more merchants than one would ever encounter, much less sink. I've customized the file to some extent in that area, if only to avoid having sunk ships given US names prior to Dec 1941, but not because I'm concerned about sinking the "same" merchant twice or seeing it again in the game after I've already sunk it. Merchants are not ID'd by name in the game anyway, so the latter is not a problem.

As noted above, if the file/feature is set up correctly, Commander will not reuse the same names in any given class list until all possible names in the list have been exhausted.



As already noted above, I have modified the EnglishNames.cfg so that each warship has a display name that identifies it in the game by historical class, not by an actual name, even if it exists in the game as a "class of one" with a specific name and its own data\Sea folder. And I have customized the ShipNames.cfg file, used by Commander in its "Real Ship Names" feature, so that - wherever possible - when I sink a warship in the game, Commander will assign it a historically accurate name for that class of ship, and will not reuse that name again until the entire list has been used and it has to start over.

So even if the game "knows" that the ship it just spawned is the HMS Warspite, I don't know that when I see it in the game. All I know is that it's a QE class battleship. If I sink it, Commander will assign it the name of a QE BB at random from the list of names provided in ShipNames.cfg for the QE class. It will not reuse one of those names until it has run through the entire list. Even if I somehow managed to sink every QE BB in existence, I would never be credited with sinking the same one twice unless I kept sinking more of them than there were names available and names got reused. I will never "see" one in the game that I already sank because they are not ID'd in the game by name to start with.