On a gut feeling I'm willing to bet that the lack of an [INTELLIGENT] tag had nothing to do with it, though. I think it was the changing of [PROGRESS_TRIGGER_POPULATION:2] to 1 that changed their behavior.
That's surely a nice thing to hope for, as I'd prefer all of my goblins sporting their silly little names, instead of just the elite ones.
Yeah, it was the [PROGRESS_TRIGGER] tags. I've played as goblins with all the other civs' progress trigger tags set to 1. Playing as a babysnatching civ makes them all automatically hostile, so they can send sieges as early as the first autumn. This can lead to a somewhat frantic beginning.
Any creature gets extra names when it kills five historical figures.
This may be true, but names also arise for more obscure reasons.
I've had named creatures (giant cave swallows, iirc) that were named just from flying around, no combat, no corpses listed whatsoever.
Well yeah, and war dogs will get names when they're assigned and when pets are adopted, but to get the four names from combat, a creature has to kill five historical figures.
I had a war dog do this once. In the same world I had an artifact with an image of a bear with four names, so I checked him out in legends and, sure enough, he had five goblin kills to his name.
(And I think you mean cave swallowmen, batmen, and gremlins instead of giant cave swallows. Those are the only ones I've seen get named by dwarves.)