Hello folks,

The next planned update for Our Pantheon is planned for this coming Sunday at the earliest and some time next week at the latest. Like I've mentioned before it will feature mostly balance changes. It will also be the last update for that version of the game. I have been hard at work on a massive restructuring of this game and am excited to focus more on that. 

I want to talk about the reasoning for the change. Mostly it comes down to the current game has a lot of spots that are easy for players to miss or forget about. I've noticed when playing that it's super easy to come up with a cool idea one round and then completely forget about that part of the map the next. Even with detailed note taking. The current game does not inspire the players to engage with the already established fiction well enough. You make something then it just kinda sits there if you don't decide to poke at it.  

I feel this is compounded by how much aether deity characters can have. Players can do a lot with their turns and I think that can lead to them being unfocused. Player turns are long. Too long! It may take an hour to resolve a single round because of that. 

One other issue I have with the current game is that there isn't enough distinction between the ages. Some feedback I got made it seem like people thought that you could only do civilization stuff in Age 3 and land creation in Age 1, and that was never true. And it won't ever be. However, the only real difference between Ages right now is that the cost of actions. Ages don't really have much personality. The amount of aether a player have also compounds this by allowing players to easily access the expensive abilities at little to no consequence. 

Hopefully the "Redux" version will not have these problems. Aether and the dice mechanics are extremely different. Just about every action has slightly different rules depending on the Age too. Rounds will likely still take a while depending on the amount and type of people playing, but I am not overly concerned at the moment as this game works well over multiple sessions. 

The thing I am most interested in about the upcoming version is that mortals will be semi-autonomous. This allows the game to be played solo and that will really help with my ability to playtest. More importantly though it will also address the concern I had above. You won't be able to just make something and forget about it. The world ticks onwards. Civilizations may play themselves, the players at the table still have to resolve everything that happens.

My concerns with civilizations having their own turns is twofold. 

One, I fear it may cause a similar issue of some players just not getting to play for 30+ minutes at a time. I plan on addressing this by making the civ turns as interactive as possible. Defining things like civilizations and factions involve multiple players and there is more emphasis on having small roleplay scenes.  It should be important that the mortals who are made have more options to have a voice. The original game only really allowed that in the chaos phase or if a deity player was really adamant about using their minor actions.

Two, it may overly deemphasize the part of this game that's about playing as gods. Making such a large part of a round about the going-ons of mortals does seem to fly in the face of the proposed concept. However, I'm not sure how true that actually is. This game (and Dawn of Worlds) are very much about the interaction between gods and mortals. That struggle is the prime focus of the games. My hope is that the new mechanics will actually help reinforce those themes. Deities can always, as long as they have the resources, meddle with mortals in some way. In fact, I suspect there will be a lot more of that.

A public version of the "Redux" version is still very far off, but it is almost in a playable state. Since it can be done singleplayer, I plan on writing up logs of my play sessions. With those I think readers will be able to get a better sense of how the game is imagined to work.

Thank you for your time.