@Xada
Understood, thanks for listening to me.

The part about the war confirms what I said. You located more effort and lines to that segment than many other inside the actual adventure, and I, as a reader, thought it was the focus or an important part of the story at first.
Through the reading, I expected the war to come back later in some way or another.
Try to reduce the elements you don’t want to focus on, especially for short stories where you have to summarize so much.

Thanks and good luck on your other projects :)

@Background Pony #8142
The war was just a mention, it wasn’t suppose to be significant. Otherwise you are correct, i am not used to writing longer stories and there was a lot of things and little time to give significance to everything.

@Xada
Sorry for the delay in my response.

First of all, the story in the following link is duplicated, after the ending it starts again, check it out in the middle:
https://www.nationstates.net/page=dispatch/id=2501830

The story is of adventures, I can assume, but one common pitfall is throwing too many things to it and not developing each scene enough. Therefore, it feels more like someone narrating what happened on a video game or movie and just stating the facts due to a lack of time and energy.

Then there is the matter of handling the scenes. Related to the above, you should care about each scene been part of the whole instead of a cluster of independent parragraphs with little connection between them. They are too abrupt, and many have no impact whatsover.
The final confrontation feels as rushed as the battles before it, instead of giving a climax or some epic conclussion to the adventure.

The war has little to do with the story. It could be a tool to explain the little resources the emperor had on its expedition, but that would make the reader think “Why is the emperor leaving the country during a DEFENSIVE war?”. If it was a war on conquest, he could just delegate on its generals, but a defensive war means they got attacked and it’s much more grave.
Why is Emperor Bigpip so out of the loop on that? The media is understandable, but why hide information to the supreme leader? And he seems very disinterested.
Red Leaf said it was coward for Bigpip to leave the Anocratic Empire in the middle of a war. That would be true if he went to Equus just to be safe, but he went to the wilderness with next to no followers (2) and minimal supplies. The ship and its crew didn’t even stayed with the emperor and were scheduled to update his situation every 30 days. If anything, it was reckless.
The enemy nations would have the opportunity of their lives to behead the empire, since they attacked first.

About the characters, Emperor Bigpip and Harmonious Percussion feel too bland after the one scene at the beginning where they discuss their time together at the island. Bigpip was acting like a generic hero with no personality almost all of the time. And Harmonious was supposed to be the moral leader and inspirer, but then he just goes and shoots someone inside their outpost for rice.
The new characters had, in my opinion, much more potential to be interesting, but they were forgotten or killed within a parragraph or two.
The ex-pirate human guy, for example, it’s introduced pointing the orb outside of camp, then never again mentioned.
Or Midnight, stated to be “A nuclear engineer, pretty, pessimistic, psychopatch. With one useful spell, enchanting quality of items.”, that could be an interesting character should she be portrayed well, but all she did was pointing at a meteorite and suggesting to check it out, before bleeding out after a four-line long battle.
The newcomer guy with gilded armour, you gave another potentially interesting character that at most only served for giving Bigpip the motivation to learn a spell.

Last but no least, there are many spelling errors, and one thing that feels the most annoying was using periods instead of commas whithin the same sentence.
“While they were cutting their way through it. Fleshmonsters would occasionaly jump out of the larger flesh mass.” –>
“While they were cutting their way through it, fleshmonsters would occasionaly jump out of the larger flesh mass.”
Maybe a proofreader could help with those issues.

I would suggest reading some material from authors considered popular or good (doesn’t have to be actual books, a decently written fanfic can work too) and watching the style used and then implement it into your works.

About the flag, maybe it was a bit complex, it might need to be simplified. A good rule of thumb is that a 5 year old can accurately draw it from memory. Try not to use too many images and if you do, let them be simple, and as few colours as possible.

Thanks for hearing my rant and I hope you don’t consider it in a bad way, I plan not to be destructive.
Peace!

@Background Pony #1D48
Alright go ahead. We probably should not use the image comments for it though. I got contacts on my website.

I may give my opinion about the story, alsp the flag and world you made, should you want to read a different point of view on those subjects.
If not, it’s fine for me.