This dynasty had a lot of potential. I liked the theme and the basic mechanics. It was unfortunate that there were few active players.

After a few dynasties out, I have some comments on common pitfalls dynasties have been falling into lately; they aren’t specific to this dynasty and don’t all apply here, so caveat emptor.

* Dry-ass themes
Some of the dynasty themes lately have been very drab. It is laudable to want to go beyond tropey game themes like wizards or spaceships but those themes are evergreen because they are exciting, because they are wide-ranging enough that they can support many types of gameplay, or because they are immediately understandable in a way that doesn’t obstruct gameplay. It’s worth thinking about what themes work and why.
* Keepaway mechanics
Making an action complex doesn’t make it fun. Complexity can be good but only if the complexity adds interesting decision space. Adding extra layers to an action to make them take longer, or harder to carry out correctly, makes the game harder to play, harder to read, and places a cognative obstacle between a player who wants to do something but who has a try-by-doing mindset to learning systems.
* The Simultaneous Reveal Action System
It’s a good system but it’s been too many in a row and it makes dynasties feel undifferentiated. Time to face the discomfort and, for the sake of texture, re-open the can on some timed or free action game systems. Relatedly:
* Invisible or secret gamestate
With low player numers, the more of the game that is hidden the less there is to inspire proposals or suggest activity. I would suggest that the next couple of dynasties be fully public information with the Emperor’s role being extremely limited.

For the record, the recent Clucky X dynasty had fully public information and seemed to go pretty well, so I agree with Josh on that point.

Timed or free action systems always seem a bit tricky due to the first-mover or last-mover problem, so they have to be carefully guided to ensure that timing doesn’t provide an inherent advantage. I think that’s why most people tend to stay away from them.

I liked the theme for this one, it seemed like a good movie-trope kind of space. I’m not sure how robust the central DNA-to-outcomes mechanic really was, and it was a shame that it never got going so that we could test it - we didn’t even have an Organism leave a Cell, let alone breach the airlocks.

For the record, the six rounds of this dynasty took 5 days, 5 days, 2 days, 2 days, 3 days and 6 days to get through, with the seventh round being at 7 days when the dynasty was chopped short. Unless there was a lot of horse-trading going on behind the scenes, it doesn’t seem like it should have taken more than a couple of days for players to decide which of a dozen letters they wanted to change. Perhaps we need to flag the game speed of a dynasty more clearly, if it’s possible for a slower player to assume (without checking the wiki history to see exactly how many days ago the progress bar moved) that everyone else is being equally slow. (I was definitely fading into the “somebody always takes 5+ days, so I guess I have five days to decide” zone by the end of the dynasty, not helped by Mutation orders being unretractable.)

Perhaps related to that, this dynasty generally didn’t feel much like a Nomic, with most proposals enacting without any discussion, and even the victory condition timing out 2 votes to 1. It was a shame that we had to manually crank Dormancy up one level.

I think hidden gamestate is a good, cheap way to add depth and dilemmas to a game without much corresponding complexity. Deal everyone a face-down poker card and you’ve instantly got some intrigue and surprises, in even a simple game. It also reduces the paralysing option to calculate the optimum move, which can be a bigger deal in a slow online game where players have the option to crunch all visible data - from the outside, Clucky X seemed too daunting for that reason, that someone was probably already running a fun little simulation of the fruit board to test out their moves.

So long as the existence of secret gamestate isn’t itself obscured (as this dynasty’s Hypotheses and ACT payouts were; regular players could keep track, new players could only decode who held what from combing the wiki history), I think it’s a positive and worth using more.

I think the issue is that with a player base that tends to only check in once every few days, secret information exacerbates the problem of engagement.

With completely public gamestate, there’s something visibily dynamic going on, and more players are apt to pay attention. Not a complete truism, but a generalization.

Still plenty of visible dynamism in a card game where you don’t know what specific cards your opponent has, but you can see the cards moving around and know how many they’re holding. This dynasty we could and should have publicly tracked the existence of the hidden stuff: a public gamestate column for “this player has an active Hypothesis”, a mention in the Synthesis reports of exactly who had received an ACT payout.