>>6033184>>6033192The setup is good, as people have said before, focusing on individual characters is a good way to get engagement in the game, as it puts a "face" to the more generic and vague systems of government, resources, and so on. I also quite like blobs because it both makes art/representation easier and you have a nice setup for differentiation between the characters (blob colors, mutations, etc.) however as someone who has ran a Civ game for a few years game I'll give some general advice.
I don't really know if more traditional Quests have this problem as much; but civ quests seem to have an especially large number of "pointless" updates, as in updates with no meaningful choices. You'll write it up with the intention of offering choices, but the players will all flock to a specific choice which, in hindsight, is obvious. Civ Quests are especially prone to this because of the lack of emotional and more material focus of the game, and secondly because of the larger time span and importance to each vote. You'll get a feel for this as time goes on; but a good example would be something like a "short term payoff vs long term investment vote". Players will never vote for the short term payoff, even if it is both realistic, obvious, or even optimal in your eyes- Quest players are risk averse and prefer efficacy in their choices and votes. This isn't ideal, because you want to make each choice meaningful and equally good for one reason or another, even if players are acting with the best interest of the civilization in mind, subtle changes in how they perceive the culture or potential "end point" of the Quest will give them multiple avenues for development. Do they want to invest in the military/warriors and be stronger? Do they want to focus on food and growth? etc. This is a useful replacement for the "roleplaying" aspect you'd find in more traditional narrative-driven quests, where instead of roleplaying as the Quest's MC, they are roleplaying the civilization as a whole. My Quest featured multiple chances and ways to direct the core culture and government of the Hegemony, which was interesting to see develop alongside the player choices with some QM fiat thrown in. However as a secondary warning again; anything that leads to exponential growth (Science research) is going to be far more desirable to the players and lead to "pointless" updates more- this is due to the multiplicative and exponential growth of technology often being a feature in sci-fi, which is why I've had to intentionally decouple it from the generic "science" branch of government in my game. It's a small thing and may not be applicable for blobs, but if you have a magic system or mutation system with a similar theme, you'll be constantly annoyed at players just pouring their resources into what you view as a boring, safe, non-intrusive choice- as to them it is the most optimal choice and the one that leads to the least setbacks.
