“Alright. Enna, anything I should know about claiming new tiles?” I asked, figuring I would get as much done as I could within the tent before going back outside where my eyes and head would be tortured by the blinding brightness of the sun.

The worst part was that it wasn’t even dark outside. All the smoke from the volcano in the sky actually kept the place somewhat shaded. The only reason it felt so harsh outside was because of my withdrawal-induced headache.

“Should I cover it from the basics?” Enna asked. “This is something that always stays the same between games, so I believe I know everything about it!”

“Sounds good to me,” I answered.

With a nod, being careful of her horns so that she wouldn’t cut me with them again, she began her explanation. “To begin with, the cost for claiming new tiles goes up with every tile you want to claim. The first tile will cost two influence, so we already have enough for one at the base price. The price will then go up every ten tiles owned. Because we already own seven tiles due to the settlement’s starting tiles, we can only claim three more tiles before the cost goes up. The cost increases by two every ten total tiles.”

“So, once we reach fifty total tiles, the cost per tile will be up to ten influence?”

“Right!”

“Sounds fair. As long as we keep on claiming tiles with special features, we should be able to keep up with the price. But if we find a region that doesn’t have many features, or features that don’t give us influence, that might hurt us.”

“Pretty much!”

“Anything else I should know?”

“Mhm! So, that just applies to the default cost per tile. Something more important to keep in mind right now is that the cost is affected by how many claimed tiles we have connecting to it. If you have two tiles connected to the one you want to claim, you get the default price. If you only one have tile connected to it, you have to pay twice the cost in influence. If no tiles are connected to it, it costs more for every tile away it is. So… if only one tile is connected to it, it costs twice as much. If no tiles are connected and it is two tiles away from our territory, it will cost three times as much. Three tiles away, four times. Four tiles, five times.”

“So, even if a tile is only two places away from a tile we own, it would cost three times as much as a tile connected to two of our own?”

“Right.”

“Then the system is designed to encourage empires that are somewhat cohesive in terms of territory.”

Enna nodded again. “And if you have more than two tiles connected to the tile you want to claim, the cost goes down even more. The cost is only seventy-five percent with three tiles connected, fifty percent with four tiles, twenty-five with five, and it’s free with six bordering tiles!”

“So, if we completely surround a tile, we get it for free.”

“Right! But it’s not really efficient to do that because you would likely spend more influence trying to surround it instead of expanding more naturally. The only time trying to claim tiles unconnected to two of our own is worth it is when you wish to rush for a potential chokepoint before anybody else gets it, or if you want to grab a terrain feature. Oh, or high-value base terrain like the leviathan hunting grounds.”

“Understandable. So, the obsidian barrier tile is only connected to one of our own. It would cost four influence to claim it by itself, meaning I would have to wait until tomorrow. Alternatively, I could claim the ash field to our left connected to two of our tiles today, and then the cost of the obsidian barrier would only be two tomorrow since it would have two tiles connected to it.”

“That’s right!”

“But if I do that, our total tiles goes up higher, meaning that the cost for tiles will increase sooner. Claiming only obsidian barrier tiles would cost twelve influence and take five days. That would take us to ten tiles. To claim the same amount of obsidian barrier tiles while claiming other tiles to only pay the default price… would get us six tiles instead of three and cost… six influence for the first three, then twelve for the next three, so eighteen total and take eight days. That crab feature is even farther away than that, so we wouldn’t be getting any extra influence per day by tiles without spending even more.”

I had to be careful about how we initially expanded. The more I thought about it, the more it felt like going for the obsidian barrier and the black crabs would be a rookie mistake. Same with going for all those happiness features. They were tempting, but I needed to keep the influence cost in mind now that I knew how it worked. None of the tiles near the obsidian barrier, save for the one with black crabs, provided any influence. And even that only provided one.

However, I remembered there being one tile nearby that I could claim for influence.

Expanding to the east would get us the magma spires I saw when we arrived. They provided a decent amount of science and influence, too, not to mention that it was only two tiles away. I could either wait two days to claim it on its own, which would cost six influence in total, or I could claim the two lava lake tiles between it and our settlement within two days for a total cost of six still. One tile per day. That meant, within three days, we’d be getting six more food, fourteen more labor, three more science, and two more influence per day. That would take us to ten total tiles, but that would be alright since we’d be up to a total of four influence per day. That would be enough for a tile a day as long as it was connected to two of our own tiles. It would also get us closer to what looked like that volcano in the distance which was probably a special feature.

To confirm that, I checked out the tile that looked like it had rivers of lava running from it.

Four science and five influence from one feature. I figured that meant the volcano must have been one of the best features there was to offer that much of a reward for it.

Adding the spires and volcano to our territory would take us up to nine influence a day, and we’d be able to reach that before even hitting twenty total tiles with claiming enough to keep things the base price. By the time the default price for tiles went up to six, we’d be making nine influence a day and could afford an average of three tiles every two days. We’d have to claim twenty more tiles after that, without getting anything else that boosted our influence, before reaching a point where we wouldn’t be able to afford a tile per day.

“I feel good about this,” I said. “We can claim lava lake and ocean tiles normally, right?”

“Right,” Enna confirmed. “We can claim them, but we won’t be able to build modifications or travel across them until we have the proper technologies for them. But that won’t stop us from gaining the basic stats from their tiles.”

“Then it’s an easy choice. We’re expanding east for now.”

Pulling up the map again, I claimed our first new tile and gave our military units new orders to continue exploring while I had it up. The unit to our south would continue heading east along the obsidian barrier while the northern unit went northeast. I wanted all of the regions around our starting region discovered.

Getting the extra two food and four labor from the normal lava lake was also a nice bonus, and we’d only be getting even more of those as we continued east.

“Alright. I think that’s all we have to do with the system today,” I said. Unfortunately, that meant going back outside.

Enna gave me a little clap that I didn’t feel like I deserved at all, but I wasn’t going to turn it down.

“Ready to go help the others some more?”

“I am!” Enna replied.

Part of me hoped that she wasn’t so that I might have an excuse to rest my eyes. But, if she was ready, so was I.