User blog comment:Krayfish/Your inspiration?/@comment-3155949-20120401082602

A lot of things are. My personality is one that is much less prone to the hardships of mental conflicts, IMHO, and I've had a deep fascination with warfare since I was a little child. As corny as it sounds, what put me on that path was my father. I remember being completely enamoured by the fact that he was a super-cool military jet plane pilot, and all that stuff little kids like. I got a bit more obsessed with it than was probably healthy, and from that point on I soaked up anything remotely related to warfare I came across. I recall two particularly striking anecdotes.

1. When I was in, oh, I think it was Kindergarten, I tried to write a letter to George Bush telling him not to take the F-14 out of service (father flew that plane). Of course, now I realize that not only is he not in charge of managing the US Navy's air fleet, but there are also many good reasons why the thing finally went out of US service (hint: Iran has twenty four F-14's).

2. I was seven, and my parents dragged me to a wedding. There was a litle childcare centre, and I was dropped off there after I tried to get the DJ to play some kid songs or something. There was a TV, so I started channel-surfing. There was one in particular that caught my interest. When my parents came to get me, they saw a whole bunch of little kids playing with trains, toy cars, dolls, houses and stuff like that. Then there was me watching a fascinating documentary on the Nazi nuclear program (thwarted by the Norwegians, how about that?).

The Eteno happened maybe two years after I first got Spore (I felt guilty about having used a cracked version for two years, so I bought the full game a while back). I made a warlike species, because I'm interested in warfare, obviously. One day, I accidentally found the SPFFW, and started posting. The rest, they say, is history.

Nah, not really. I tried to make the EIT a sort of perfect militaristic yellow Reagan midgets. As they developed, however, I shaped them more like Prussia. This quote sums it up best:

"While some states possess an army, the Prussian army possesses a state."

Their nation is still strong, yes, but the military is a horrifyingly independent creature. It has stocks of money and resources just to ensure its own survival, and I plan to have them own stocks in companies. In the case of an upheaval, it would not be a people's army changing with the people's government, it would be the Imperial Armed Forces fighting to sustain itself.

The EIT isn't very cultured, an attribute taken from some other notable military powers of history.

"When I hear the word culture... I release the safety on my Browning!" -From one of Nazi Hanns Johst's plays.

Also, I don't know anything about culture.

Names, obviosuly, are derived from central European and Eastern European cultures.

Military tactics, weapons, vehicles, strategies, and ships are influenced by a wide variety of nations and cultures. This includes Israel, the USSR, Prussia, Germany, the UK, Macedonia, Japan, the US, and France (France doesn't have a spectacular track record of winning... Well, anything really, but they invented the light infantryman).

I don't know what else to say, but I love answering questions. Especially military-related questions. Even if you don't really need the information but you want to please your resident gun nut, ask away!