With Zira by my side, I opened up communications with the volcano hounds and was greeted by the same woman as before. “Morning, Kaila,” I said. “I’ve got good news.”

Kaila’s ears twitched atop her head as her tail started wagging behind her. “Morning! Did you finish the quest? Find a hunting ground for us? We’re so hungry… and fighting each other is boring. Need a good hunt!”

“I found what I think will probably be the best game you could ask for. At least, if you’re all feeling hungry.”

“You did?!”

“I did. Well, we did. I can’t take the credit for what our hunters found.”

“Doesn’t matter! Where is it?”

The map opened up to let me choose a tile to give them for the quest. As soon as I selected it, a prompt popped up to ask me if I was sure and then I accepted it.

I let out a heavy sigh of relief and felt like collapsing into a relaxing sleep right then and there since our biggest issue was no longer a concern. I resisted, though, somehow.

That aside, they must have got another military unit in the last couple of days. Considering how strong they seemed, and that it made our numbers even, it was a good thing we got them on our side rather than turned them against us.

I wanted to move right on to looking at the new settlement, but I made sure to give our new allies a welcome first. “Glad to have you with us. I’m looking forward to learning more about all of you.”

Kaila didn’t seem too interested. “It’s time to hunt! Talk later!” And just like that, the communications closed to the sight of her running off with a wagging tail.

With that closed, I looked at Zira and gave her a pat on the shoulder. “Go get some rest now.”

“I will,” Zira replied. “Also, good work. I hesitate to give you too much praise given how incredibly based on luck this whole turn of events is, but you have managed to keep us in this regardless.”

“We won’t just stay in this game. We’re going to win it.”

“Keep it up and I might just believe those words.” Zira let out a tired sigh and left, actually walking normally for once instead of using her wings to carry her around the place.

That left me alone with the system to go over our new settlement and some plans.

For starters, there was something endearing about the name “Mount Hound.”

Moving on, having a volcano was really nice considering that it more than doubled our influence gain. And there was still another for us to get. Though, seeing that we had multiple settlements hurt my pride. My go-to strategy was to always win through the power of a single mega city, but having multiple settlements was undeniably good at the moment. Honestly, it might even be best to go and form another one. Especially since there was that cluster of features to the north in the plains region where I would get three tile features with the starting tiles of a new settlement.

Part of me was tempted to still try and stick to the one-city style of mine. Find a way to absorb the new settlement into New Liberty, for example, since that was usually a mechanic in these sorts of games.

But it might be a while before I could get anything like that, plus I would probably have to spend influence on connecting their borders first.

For now, I merged the two new Volcano Hound groups together, which only had one unit of Volcanic Predators each in them which seemed to be a unique unit type for them, and sent them east to discover the region bordering them. There was a tile that settlement couldn’t claim yet due to being in an undiscovered region. I had no idea if they would automatically get the tile by discovering the region or not, but we needed to discover more of our surroundings in the first place.

At the same time, our two demon units could merge for safety’s sake and then continue tracking beasts in the same area.

And for now, my beloved strategy be damned, it really might be best to create another Settler unit to send north.

There was just too much at stake to stubbornly hold onto my favorite strategy. Maybe I could convert to it later on if I get a way to merge settlements, but having more settlements seemed like an objectively good way to go for the time being as long as I could keep happiness high, and I doubted that would be a problem.

So, I queued up a Crafters’ Tent in Mount Hound and switched production away from the Gathering Camp to a new Settler unit made with Volcano Hounds.

And there was still a good amount I had to look over before I could wrap up system work for the day.