Me and Enna returned to the camp and had breakfast with a couple of the demons who hadn’t eaten it yet. As for what our breakfast consisted of, all we had to eat was jerky and water—the food that automatically spawned in every single food basket.

Now, I loved meat. Jerky, too. It was in every American’s blood to love meat. Few things better than it existed.

That being said, I was getting bored of having the same thing for every meal every day. I wanted some variety. I wanted a good hamburger or hotdog. Maybe some coleslaw. Roasted vegetables. All that good stuff.

But all we got was jerky.

That almost made me tempted to rush the farming-related technologies so that they could start growing some variety. At least then we’d get to eat some greens with our jerky. Keeping animals was something else we had to work on.

I wanted steak.

Then again, getting that hunting technology could potentially solve the lack of steak.

Food issues aside, our units should have moved to their next positions for the day, so I opened up the map to check on it and saw that they did, in fact, reach two more regions.

So, we doubled up on grassy regions to the north while doubling up on ocean regions to the south. It looked like we got a few new biomes, too.

I wasn’t going to waste my time checking every single feature just like I hadn’t been, so I only looked at the tiles with features that were part of biomes I didn’t recognize. Looking at the rest of the tiles in detail could be saved for when there was nothing else to do or when I was trying to sleep at night.

Starting with the north.

Just a few tiles directly to the north of our unit was a group of five tiles with a single feature in them.

Grabbing that feature could prove useful in the future, but it was too far away to care about in the moment. It was just something to keep in mind.

A few tiles to the right of that was what looked like a real tiny biome only a couple of tiles in size. The only other biome around that size was the bubbling cauldron to our east.

“Thirteen science for a single tile. That’d be nice if it was closer,” I said. “We’re going for the volcano, so it won’t be too far, but I’d rather not stretch our territory out too thin.”

I was about to ask Enna a question seeing as how she was by my side like always, but somebody else spoke up before she could.

“Then we can place an outpost up there,” Sara said. “Once we get the technology for it, that is. But I believe we won’t have that until the next era.”

If she wanted to help, I wasn’t going to turn her down even if Enna looked uncomfortable with it. I wanted to give her a chance to cooperate with us. Though, because I did care about Enna’s comfort, I wrapped an arm around her waist to hug her against me side before asking Sara, “How do you know? The research tree won’t show me any details for those techs.”

“Because every game has had an option like that. There is always an option to create outposts that claim territory similar to settlements, but that do not operate like settlements do. They tend to be far cheaper than claiming new tiles normally, and you can claim new tiles next to them without suffering distance penalties from not being connected to the main territory. The only issue is danger and transport. If it isn’t connected to the main territory, all of its income has to be physically transferred to the chosen city. They need guards as well. Depending on how the individual game is set up, they may have some constructions to build within them, but they cannot grow in population nor build districts—districts being something else that will be available later.”

I was impressed. I wanted to joke around and tell her that I was surprised she could be useful, but I didn’t want to discourage her right after she finally decided to cooperate with us. “I see. Thanks for explaining that. If that’s the case, it should be possible to set up an outpost somewhere and claim territory from two ends. Claim new tiles connected to the main territory working toward the outpost, and claim new tiles connected to the outpost working toward the main territory.”

“Possible, yes, but there would be no real point in doing that unless you have the influence to burn. It would still be cheaper to simply claim your way toward it normally, and it would use fewer tiles to keep your total lower.”

“That’s true. Instead, it would be better to use outposts for gaining control over strategic chokepoints and rare resources. Then, if there are any other tiles or features nearby worth grabbing, expand to those but keep the outposts small beyond that.”

“Precisely.”

“I might do something like that for the eye then, though it would make me feel a lot more comfortable if I could find a chokepoint and claim that instead. I don’t like being in such open flat land.”

“Neither do I. We have excellent resources and several rare biomes available to us, but no strategic options. Well, aside from the ocean. We have some strategic luck there assuming that my theories are correct about what will happen if anybody tries sailing through some of those biomes. There are only two safe paths to our coast, and both of those could be locked down with floating fortresses assuming they were kept from the last fantasy-styled game.”

“You know a lot about these games?”

“I do. I came into this with every intention of winning. That is why I will put up with your attitude and way of doing things for now. If helping you means that we will win, then I will help you to the best of my ability.”

“I appreciate it. You don’t need to like me, and you don’t need to like anybody else, but you need to respect us. Do that and we’ll respect you, too. We all want to win this.”

Sara sighed and flipped her hair back. “So long as you don’t expect anything more than that, I accept.”

I really wanted to ask her if that was so hard after all, but I resisted for the sake of not ruining our just-formed relationship.

Whatever her reasons for helping me were could be figured out later. For the time being, I was just relieved to have her working with us since it meant less drama to deal with. And, apparently, it meant more knowledge.

Now, looking at the neighboring chunk of ocean we discovered showed what looked like a large mass of sea ice to the very bottom, but those grey dots over deep water were what really caught my attention as I hadn’t seen those tiles before.

“Good, I was right,” Sara said. “The only safe option to our coast is avoiding almost every biome in front of it. The deep ocean and shallow ocean tiles are the only safe routes, and each route has a one-tile-wide path at some point. And having such a wide coast will also be good for building coastal artillery modifiers on.”

The moment she said coastal artillery, my mind went back to my previous idea about building a beach resort… but with the addition of giant cannons along the beach on both sides of it.

It shouldn't even need said, but there are few things more American than big guns. The bigger the cannons, the safer our people will be. Hopefully, said cannons would never need used in the first place... but they could always be fired for fun, too.