I thought that this was an interesting ruleset, in the end. It’s a real shame that it didn’t take off, and the ending was of course unfortunate.

One of my longstanding theories of dynastic success is that a single mechanical idea does not make a dynasty; in order for it to take off, you need two different good ideas that play off each other. This being nomic, the ideas don’t both need to come from the Emperor, and can be gradually stitched together.

Last dynasty had the Probulator and only basic uses of it. There wasn’t much of a second dynamic available.

@Bucky Yeah, that makes sense.  I had originally planned making Funds more important (e.g the whole “stock market” thing, maybe purchasing parts to upgrade the Probulator) but never really got around to doing anything with it.

This is more of a note-to-self than anything, but I was also hesitant to propose stuff in case I broke something due to my relative inexperience, and I think that contributed to the dynasty stalling out (or at the very least, didn’t help).

I’d agree with that being the issue. Even without having heard that theory myself, I found that near the start of the dynasty, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop in terms of what the dynasty would be. All of the functions kinda felt like they were intended as filler proposals to pass time until that happened and it felt like it never did.

I think a dynasty can run fine on a single mechanic, so long as it’s one that involves enough decision-making to feel like a game, and where it’s easy to build on it with proposals - which it looks like this one did, it just didn’t have the players (and Dormancy didn’t do its job of pausing the game in response to that).

If I had to define dynastic success from mechanics, I’d say that the ones with a meaningful gameplay loop from the start generally do okay, and the more meandering sandbox ones are harder to pull off, because the group will have different ideas about how to thread the needle of a mid-dynasty victory condition.