The essay Avoiding Dead Ends calls out the following risk:

Silent Gameplay
Situation
One or more core mechanics of a dynasty require few or no gamestate changes to perform. This may be minimal (players rolling dice in the die roller, updating the wiki for a minority of their results and never announcing anything on the blog) or could even be entirely secret (players sending private orders to the Emperor, which update secret variables).
Result
To a casual player of the game, it looks like nothing much is happening: even a game with active wiki gameplay can seem stagnant if the variables are subtle and the player doesn’t check the wiki page history. In cases where the main game actions are secret and invisible, even the most attentive player of the game may not know whether anyone else is actually playing. If some players start to assume that no game is really being played, they’re inclined to give up and idle out.
Solutions
Add noise to the game by having some of the larger game actions require a post to the blog, or have a mechanic that generates “game news” summaries periodically.

Therefore add the following as a new Mandate:

A Plan should require that dynastic gameplay be conducted largely in public, or should contain some reasonably frequent public-facing update of the Emperor.