[Eugene Church]

ALB123, as far as the backstory, I never got into your questions, which was a mistake... if I had it to do over, I would have gone into more detail about the countries of Ruthlandia and Tycobbia,their histories, government and people... now that would have made the IPA a special dynasty thread.

Like many, many dynasty writers, I just started with a basic backstory with some detail, then I just started reporting the baseball league... basically the IPA became what no dynasty should become, in my opinion, a stats' dump... the good dynasty reports continue to follow the basic storyline that they begin with... the good ones expand on them... but this is hard to do and time-consuming.

I wish I had expanded the story lines and made the IPA commissioner, owners and players more involved like I did at the beginning... a good dynasty report makes the league people come alive... but sadly, I didn't.

Now the IPA is just a stats' dump, but the OOTP Community is still following it... so it must be pretty good as a dynasty report.

Commercially and socially, the towns are pretty much aligned to function in the American and English life styles.

Hope this answers your questions... if you have more, I will try to answer them.

Thanks for reading the IPA... appreciate it.

Why it's two countries?... I embarrassingly never covered that part of the history... never really thought about it.... but I should have.

The two countries have English as the official language... however, some towns are ethnically-oriented and have a second language and its own culture... but Ruthlandia and Tycobbia are basically American and English-based linguistically and culturally.

I posted a town history for each team in the IPA early in the thread... many of the OOTP Community people volunteered to create the town histories... I think they may have written 20 town histories... they were really well done and creative and added a lot of life to the IPA dynasty... I wrote the other 40 or so town histories and they were not quite as good.

About 5 years ago, a reader suggested I get custom graphics instead of using the poor default graphics in the game... they were just plain and simple... not really well done... so I got the wonderful OOTP Graphics Community to design them and they did it... that is one of the best decisions I ever made... good graphics doubled and tripled my daily viewership... and it really made me enjoy the league much more... good graphics will really add to the popularity of a dynasty report... all dynasty threads should have good graphics... they make the dynasty report better... the team logos, jerseys and caps really help me get immersed in the Islandian Pro Alliance... so much so, I would like to take a tour of Ruthlandia and Tycobbia... hoping one day Viking Cruises will take me and my wife there on one of their fabulous river cruises.

My wife and I took a 13-day Viking cruise in Russia 2-3 years ago... and it was fabulous... well worth the high expense... EC is very hard to please... I have very high standards... Viking Cruises was even better than my high standards... it was a tremendous experience... I highly recommend Viking Riverboat tours.