I took a look at your factbook post and made a few observations you might be able to use to make improvements:
- The body text of your post is all in boldface type, but there really is no need for everything to be bolded and you can save space if you only use font formatting to make words and phrases stand out.
- Your geography section could use some detailed maps (e.g. a physical map showing natural features and a political map showing where your cities are located).
- Your history section is very short by NS standards. You do not need to come up with a detailed history right away. Instead, you should treat it like a tree and try to make it grow a little bit bigger and more interesting as time goes on. If you have participated in any roleplay threads, you can always beef up your history section by adding summaries of whatever you did in them.
- Your demographics and economy sections have a few statistics, which is good, but it also has very little detail. What is your population’s racial, religious, and linguistic composition? How much trade do you have? What kinds of taxes do your people pay?
- You might want to consider looking at the CIA World Factbook or other online sources for ideas on formatting items and laying out your post. You can always look at my factbook collection for ideas.
- One last thing: the big selling point that makes NationStates special (indeed unique) is its emphasis on originality. At its most basic level, the big idea behind NS is to create a fictitious country that is your own (i.e. something not based off real life or historical fiction). Right now your factbook makes it look like you simply took the Federal Republic of Germany and quickly changed its name, history, and a few statistics, but it still looks like a real-life country, not something novel or original. While there is no rule against doing this, it does look a bit “lazy” and might lead new players who do not know you well to assume that you lack creativity even if you have spent a lot of time brainstorming your work. Of course, some players (e.g. the “hard MT” community) actually do a really good job of using historical versions of RL countries and characters as foundations for roleplaying, but they also tend to be very experienced, active writers with a lot of historical knowledge.
I hope my advice can help you improve your factbook and make roleplaying easier around here. Please send me a telegram if you have any questions.