To recruit new heroes or add new gods to your pantheon, you'll need to send your heroes on quests. Hektor may offer to join you if you can find Herakles' lion cloak, or he may even join up if you pay the requisite amount of ambrosia. There's a similar operation for recruiting gods. Heroes are your main combatants in the game. Their efforts can be supplemented by the intervention of gods, small citizen armies recruited from your towns and summoned monsters.
Players can fight alongside or against monsters such as the hydra, kraken and dragons.
On the more prosaic side, you've got skeletons, wolves and plain old elemental titans. Although we didn't get to see too much of the combat interface, it's a lot like the Baldur's Gate interface. Heroes are also the agents of technological growth in the game. Rather than relying on traditional tech trees and research routines, Pantheon uses a quest based research system. Scattered across the map are sage huts.