Ok, you surprised me with this one - I feel like ever since you started your duranium legion it had much higher posting frequency than me. As for those "5 posts a day", I don't get what you mean, the amount of content published at once did not change at all, I only divided it into more posts because I saw the scrolling times were too high so I wanted to divide it so that less actual content would be present per one forum page, making it a bit easier to navigate. Besides, it's not like the pace I post is the pace you have to read it in, the older ones won't get deleted just because I moved forward
This did get a lot better after the beginning. I remember when the AAR started I was reading through the intro post and quite intrigued, then saw there were already about ten more posts and quietly set it aside for later.
I think I misspoke, "frequency" is not the right word, as you're correct that I do post more frequently myself. What I mean is more the volume of posts made in a short period, mentally there is a difference between seeing that an AAR thread is updated and thinking "oh yay, a new post!" versus seeing several posts all at once. This may be an idiosyncrasy of mine, though - I always have
something on the backburner, currently in fact I'm working through Kurt's SF campaign, so adding more material to that backburner means it's liable to sit unread for longer than I'd like.
Of course I'll reiterate, if you prefer doing it your way, by all means do as that's the most important thing.
yeah, at first I was like "imma gonna post all the systems for reference", but later I actually got tired of this but kept with it for the sake of consistency...
It is an author's prerogative to change their mind whenever they like.
Personally, I feel if something gets tedious to keep up with it is better to drop it unceremoniously to keep up morale. The readers not only don't care, but likely will not notice if you distract them with a glorious space battle.
As for battles, thoguh, what do you suggest? What should be cut out? I was posting a lot of screenshots because I often liked the way npr ships arranged and many of them just looked cool IMO so I wanted to show them. And I feel like even if I posted less of them, the actual writing would not be affected, that was just the way I described battles. What kind of narrative did you had on mind? How these battles could be improved in your opinion?
I think the main thing is that the screenshots should support the narrative - for example it is much easier to show fleet positions visually than in words - and the narrative should give a context for each screenshot, sort of a symbiosis effect really. From the reader's perspective, I think one assumes that each screenshot is conveying important information and without to connection to the text it is easy to get a bit lost trying to keep track of that information from one image to the next, to the next, and so on. This is how I think of screenshots in general - as a means of conveying information. And of course sometimes they just look cool.
One perhaps "trick" that I try to use to expand the in-game events into a coherent narrative is a "cause-event-effect" structure. Basically, what actually happens in-game is a series of events, however in the RP context every event has a cause (usually in the form of a rationale leading to an order being given, in my case anyways) and an effect. This can be useful as an effect can in turn be a cause for the next event, thus you can begin to link successive events with narrative which tells an engaging story. Of course not every "event" needs such detail, the level of detail which is interesting is decided by the author after all. Similarly the actual structure does not need to be so rigid, you can for example give the "cause" as an overriding rationale early on and then as several different events happen because of that rationale you can describe the impact on the broader situation.
For the battles specifically, I flipped back through a few updates and there's a fair few occasions where the positions of two fleets do not change much between screenshots, other than getting closer to each other or showing weapon hits. In my opinion, things like that can easily be summarized in the text - which helps the images that remain stand out more, very effective if you want to highlight the cool parts more.
Sorry buddy, that is entirely on you as you admitted to just skimming through instead of reading carefully.
Assuredly.
Except I guess it is also partially on me, too, because now that I've re-read it, I see it wasn't phrased quite clearly. I should be more precise here, this description isn't very clear as to what this theory actually is, I see here I didn't even mention the competition for the matter needed for survival, only the part about hostility being safer option, difficult communication and chain of suspicion. I didn't even use "Dark Forest Theory" explicitly here... (but you thinking it was a region of space and not a theory was entirely your fault still )
This was more how I read it, the "Dark Forest" seemed to be an understood concept already and the paper being described talked about how to survive in said Dark Forest. That said, the actual description I think was clear, it was the title throwing me off.
Anyways, someone mentioned this earlier in the feedback thread if I remember correctly, but what kind of explanation do you have on mind? Inside or oustide AAR? Could you also point out other examples of what was unclear for you?
Whichever one works best for you. As a reader I choose not to be picky about how an author chooses to communicate the story, as long as the story is engaging and the communication is clear. If I can understand everything that is happening and is meant to be understood, that is sufficient. I say "meant to be understood" - sometimes you may wish for something to be left unexplained on purpose, either to create mystery and intrigue or just because something is not important enough to spend words on.
As for other examples, I think the main ones were those already mentioned by the feedback, about the drive tech changes and such, though I didn't find this too confusing as I'm used to seeing people retcon Aurora tech into their chosen RP universe.
Anyways, thanks a lot again for some input, hopefully my next one will fix all these problems.
You've certainly got a good base to build on. I look forward to the next work! I wouldn't be too harsh in saying these are "problems", much is up to stylistic choices and differences and even the best author always finds improvements the next time around.
One other point I will raise - if you haven't already (and I'm certain that you have), reading the works of other authors can give a lot of inspiration. My own work takes inspiration to various degrees from Steve's Imperium of Man campaign, Zap0's Race to the Stars, and several AARs for other games I've read over the years.