What there still is to do to 'win' the game.
Well, my perspective of winning is a bit skewed, because I think it means I can do whatever I wish, including going for both of the bigger endings. Or not.
If I wanted a 'hard' timer...
The timer is not hard, you can increase it with sacrifices. But it's always there, reminding you that you can't just laze about like Smaug. Look what happened to
him, even without a demon invasion!
Fair enough. I still don't want to play with passive decay while I'm basically a big snake keeping a low profile.
Well, you're a snake who has to become a proper dragon ASAP.
Or else.
Possibly just the archmage quietly restoring seals, while the king doesn't demand his attention, since I think I recall you having stated that the archmage is one of the few really against the demons somewhere.
It's a possible interpretation. My take on this is that since there exist
dark archmages, and the Capital needs both protection and someone to keep the politics sane, he really can't go anywhere long enough to matter. It's a pretty common trope, being a mage of awesome power who can't really use it because he'll upset the status quo.
The King is a paranoid narcissist who might be fine with a sword and leading a battle. But as to effective government, he's like most historical kings: useless where it counts.
After all, from my understanding you start as a cat-sized snake, not a dangerous dragon.
But you're the Dark Lady's progeny, and people remember that. Plus,
someone might have spread around a few rumours that there's a new dragon about.
Or the more reasonable interpretation: the minimum seal decay is what the cultists perform as a sort of background noise, what with the King being a self-centered asshat and the Kingdom going complacent after the war with the Lady. People would go after them when the seals go down
a lot, but with the dragon, they are always thinking "what if it's worth it?"
Edit: Or let me put it this way: the goal of the mod is to survive and prosper as a dragon, overcoming various challenges. It is not to 'experience' the game, because the experience is not particularly deep from a VN or RP point of view. That is, there are lots of better written games with far more consistent and likely nicer art, even ones featuring a monster protagonist. It's basically the same difference as there was between Civ5 and the previous Civs: the former was massively more popular because the default game experience was no longer that of a strategy game. It was 'roleplaying' a rather small culture. Same thing here. Edit2: And DMM is
not Civ5 in the above example.