Naming units

[Emala XI]

I love to name units, and cities and geographic features for that matter. Anything like this that personalizes a game is fun. On the GOG Deadlock forum someone said that they thought you could name units in DL1. Is this true? If so, any idea why this was dropped from DL2? But, even if you can't name units, each at least has a unique identifying number. Nothing more boring that a game where you have several of the same type of unit and nothing to distinguish them from each other.
Interestingly enough Alpha Centauri - which is the greatest turn based strategy game even made, even today 15 years after it was released - one of the very few things you could not do was name units? You can name damn near everything else in the game but not units.
I suspect, to offer a possible answer to my own question, that whether a game has or does not have a feature to name units, has to do with the psychology of the designer. I would wager that designers who are very interested in military history would include such a feature and those that see the military aspect as no more important that social, economic, political factors, might not; it just would not occur to them with as much immediacy.

Thanks

[Ubergeneral Grunt]

Deadlock II was contracted out by Accolade to a different company: Cyberlore, who made many strange design decisions, for no obvious reason (why would they fix the resolution to 640x480?)! I never noticed you couldn't rename units in Deadlock II, but I never named units in DL1 anyway.

If you are just starting with the Deadlock series, stick with Deadlock I, it is a much-much better game.

P.S. Welcome to the forum Emala XI.

[Tggtt]

I have named units in DL1, but not very often.
However, that's something I always do when I play Transport Tycoon (includes Transport Tycoon Deluxe and OpenTTD).
That's a feature I had planned for ODL since the beginning for units and for other things.
The models for the file structures allowed to have private names (to the user) and public names for territories as well, which would also allow each player to name territories differently.

Now we have much more encouragement to make it happen.
Thanks for the indirect suggestion.

[Emala XI]

Thanks, all. I got DL2 first solely because I read that DL1 had NO diplomacy and I couldn't imagine a strategy game without this. But I have noticed a number of players here and at the GOG site prefer DL1. I will procure it soon as I can afford it.

[Tggtt]

DL1 has diplomacy, you can message the AI with several types of messages to make it more enemy of less enemy, you simply cannot create an official alliance.
I have got both at once in the launch promo but I already had DL1.