Do you name your Privateers after famous Pirates?

[Osama McDonald]

??? Privs rule! How can you not build them? Hmmm?

I name them after famous celeberties rather then pirates. Same with the workers. If George Clooney is in trouble, I send Angelina Joelie to bombard the bastards!

 

[Sanctum]

How do you name units, other then when you get a military great leader?

 

[Aabraxan]

If you have the "Advanced Unit Actions" activated in the Preferences menu, you'll see a button labeled "ABC." Hit that it it'll let you rename the active unit.

 

[MAS]

Right-click on a unit and it will appear as a contextual menu option.
Its a conquest feature though, it can't be done in vanilla (I don't know about PTW)

 

[tomart]

When I'm in the mood, I like to rename cities and units, especially ships and Armies. Army Sun Tzu or the First Medieval Army adds character, battleships and carriers have great evocative names, and if I have lots of modern infantry and armor I like to number them, etc.

And place names help me remember where that town is when I have a huge empire.
South Eastport, Marshland, West Podunk, Total Wasteland, Lower Abyss, Nerdsville, Townsville, you can get creative and it's fun. And when I can build a canal city connecting two seas (sometimes a fabulous strategic advantage which the ai never does) it's usually Panama.

 

[anaxagoras]

I never thought to rename my privateers. That might be fun. I do build them. They force the AI into being even worse at amphibious war than it already is.

 

[sercer88]

Right-click on a unit and it will appear as a contextual menu option.
Its a conquest feature though, it can't be done in vanilla (I don't know about PTW)

I've played in vanilla, and pressing "shift-N" will cause a pop-up (is that the military advisor?) to ask you if you want to rename the unit.

I have only renamed my "unit*" units (the ones I get leaders from.) but in the Pirates! Yaaar! scenario by Paasky, I renamed all of my veteran and above privateers (which fairly early in the game amounted to over 50!!)

 

[Marsden]

I don't rename the privateers. But as an aside regarding them, because they are "unmarked" they are technically barbarians and therefore always at war with any civ, which means if you have an enemy with a lot of coast and sea tiles they're depending on for food, you can blockade and starve them without declaring war.

 

[axehaxe]

I use privateers as support units to take out ships redlined by my stacks of frigates in some games but I never put a priority on building them because they kinda suck. Also they are good to distract and discourage those annoying AI frigates that keep bombarding your cities when that happens.

Originally Posted By Marsden

I don't rename the privateers. But as an aside regarding them, because they are "unmarked" they are technically barbarians and therefore always at war with any civ, which means if you have an enemy with a lot of coast and sea tiles they're depending on for food, you can blockade and starve them without declaring war.

That IMO is not such a good idea. Even if the AI only has galleys, because privateers have only a 1 defense, your privateers will eventually become slaughtered by just about anything and everything the AI has. That would be a major waste of shields. If you had other units on top of the privateers, you may end up triggering an unplanned war anyway when a sea unit tries to exit out of that city or with other civs passing by.