Hello! If you are new to the forum, and want to start up your own faction for role-playing and other reasons, you are in the right place! This guide will run you through the process of how to start up, maintain, and prosper as a forum faction!

Setting up your faction

1. Before you even make your faction’s page, try to sort out what the background story for it is. Are you miners, traders, warlords? Will you be on a budget, have limited recourses? If this doesn’t sort out for you, just make a very loose and basic story and let what happens to your faction in the future make your story.

2. Next, make some ships for your faction. Remember to give them all a simmalar style of appearance, and be sure to paint them! Your ship won’t be downloaded or used without a paint job!

3. Finnaly, make yourself a page in the forum’s lore section, and put on it information about your faction’s history, ships and other information.

Running your faction

1. The first step in running a faction is to get yourself noticed. The worst way to do this is to go around asking for alliances and starting wars. The best practice is to take part in pre-existing events, offering trades to other factions or supporting your favourite side in a war. Often these will soon start up alliances which are stronger, and more significant to your faction’s story.

2. Make sure you have a story for everything. You could just say that we went and blew up everything, but that makes no sense. If you went and explained how it came to that, added some backstory and even mixed some other factions into the mix, you will end up with some very interesting and fun storylines.

3. Always be flexible, especially when working with other users. Often, you may get overprotective of your faction, and end up trying to stake that you always win. This may end up in conversations like “I shoot your ship” “I shoot your ship with bigger ship” “I shoot your ship with even bigger ship”. Often this makes things boring, repetitive and not fun. Sometimes you will have to go with the flow and allow yourself to be blown up.

4. Since responses and replies to others when role playing can take a while, it is often a good idea to flesh the most out of your replies when you can. Instead of writing quick replies to say what happened next, and wait for them to respond, take your time to flesh out the story-line a bit. Make it more interesting. You can also "puppet" a faction, by controlling their characters, within reason, especially when you know what their responses are going to be.

5. When writing peices of story line, or replying to another faction, you may format your text as a script, using *italics* for actions and bold for markers, for example:

   Jack attempts to grab his spanner, but he ends up knocking it off the bench.
   Jack: Darnit!

   Another way this could be done is by illistrating communications messages between factions, using [tranmission begin] and [/transmission end] tags appropriately.

   [transmission begin]
   This is an important transmission outlining the importance of important transmissions, which as you all know are important.
   [/transmission end]

   A few technology based factions even outline their story as code:

   Stupidity = 1
   Sanity = 0
   if self.health <= 0 then
     humans.destroy()
   

   How to format your text is shown below in Writing Tips, Tricks and Best Practices, under the BBCode tuorial.

Writing on the Forum: Tips, Tricks and Best Practices

1. When writing a post, you have two options. If you want to reply to a user, click the grey “reply” button on their post. The post will also automatically have an @mention tag in it, try not to delete it! This will also give them a notification to the user, so making it easier to communicate. If you just want to add a general post, click the large blue reply button on the side of the page. This will not notify anyone, but will also make the post seem more important to everyone.

2. When a user has replied to another person, you can also hover over the username of the reply receiver, and it will show a hint of the message that has been replied too. You can also click on the hint to go to that message.

3. You can also reply to multiple users and posts in the same message! Try starting a new reply, and clicking the grey reply button on other posts as well, and an @mention tag will be automatically placed into your post. This is also considered good practice when writing multiple replies, as it avoids a thread being spammed with multiple messages from the same user.

4. Select some text from another post, and click the black "Quote" button that appears, to have a quote added into your post. This makes it easier to outline certain parts of a post.

5. Use formatting when writing posts. Adding certain symbols around text will alter the text style, and make the text interesting. For example:

   *italics*
   **bold**
   ~~strikethrough~~
   # Title
   ## Heading ##
   
   Quote
   
   

   italics
   bold
   strikethrough

   Title

   Heading

   Quote

6. you can also use BBcode to achieve similar results, and more:

   [b]Bold[/b]
   [i]Italics[/i]
   [u]Underline[/u]
   [s]Strikethrough[/s]
   [size=100]Big Text[/size]
   [size=1]Little Text[/size]
   [color=red]C[/color][color=orange]o[/color][color=yellow]l[/color][color=green]o[/color][color=blue]r[/color][color=purple]s[/color]!
   [quote]Quote[/quote]
   [h1]Heading[/h1]
   [list]
   [*]L
   [*]i
   [*]s
   [*]t
   [/list]
   

   ---

   Bold
   Italics
   Underline
   Strikethrough
   Big Text
   Little Text
   Colors!

   Quote

   [h1]Heading[/h1]

   • L

   • i

   • s

   • t

7. When writing any posts, correct grammar and spelling is greatly appreciated by many members of the community. Although the odd stuff-up which is quickly rectified by an edit is acceptable, many users are easily peeved off when it comes to these things, so it’s better to be on the safe side (I don’t actually care, but alot of people do :/)

And finally, have fun, check back on the forum regularly, and enjoy the show!