[Erax]

OK, I told you how I decided to sit down and write a story, now I'll tell you the choices I made before I started typing away.

I knew I was going to write a turn-report kind of story, because I liked ROTRS so much. But it also had to offer something different, something the other stories hadn't touched on before. I had been playing around with the Crossover mod some time before and I love Star Wars, so I decided to start a game as the Star Wars Empire and give every other race standard SEIV tech. I believed conflict and interaction between the different tech trees would be fascinating (and it is, but I've discovered it takes second place to role-playing the Empire).

In my special case, I knew my tech tree would be a challenge in itself (small ships initially, expensive weapons research, few opportunities to steal alien tech), so I set the AI at an easy level - medium difficulty and no bonus.

As for the story format itself, I wanted it to be different too. I got the idea for the 'war diary' format from Dracula (of all things). It is a challenge to write the battle scenes in this format but it makes the standard 'we did this and this happened' part much easier.

The initial Posts were actually quite easy, they practically wrote themselves. I checked my thread and discovered I did 13 story Posts in the first three days. After that things started slowing down, the game and the story became more complex and I eventually settled down to a routine of one post a day, five or six a week (although this week I've missed two days already and I am angry at myself for it).

More about how I write up each 'diary entry' later.