I keep all symbols and spaces out of my internal name variants, and only use them in the external name variants. I keep all name lists in excel, and use the concatenate command to add brackets around the words to make sure my lists in descr_names.txt match the names.txt file. Don't leave anything to chance. Make absolutely sure they always match up, and also I never type names into to descr_strat, I only copy and paste them from my descr_names.txt file. This way it reduces the chance for errors. And I'm talking about huge names, and thousands of them (our EB dn.txt file has more than 10,000 last time I checked), and (knock on wood) we don't have any problems at all with names. Internal names can get long, but just leave all that other stuff for the external variants (that show). We've got internal variants like: Nvmerivsmessienvs or IlWatarYuhanem or arvernimocTaximagulos or Ornithopoleosphoinikikes or Stratonikeiasbabyloniakes. Use Excel and make your life a lot easier keeping them straight and reducing errors. I always play it safe too and have more than 10 names in each category though. And make sure you don't have repeated names in descr_strat.txt for characters (captains is ok). Oh, and I replace all spaces with nothing. So sometimes a space that pops up at the end of a word doesn't hurt anything.