There was a game that played very, very close to this one that I wished I knew where to find.
In it, you played as the dragon, but on the more evil side of things. In the game 'your mother' was a demon queen or some such that gives birth to your egg, then you hatch and so on starting out as a whelp. She tasks you with building an army by finding a lair, then raiding places for materials and resources. The way to create army beasties was to fly out and capture princesses, then do the dirty and have her birth the spawn. Over time, you were able to evole and age into new types of dragons.