Needless to say, I was overwhelmed with regrets when I woke up in the morning on the thirteenth day.

I might not have been suffering from intense headaches every day anymore, but I still felt the withdrawal symptoms. My entire body felt a little sore, my head felt foggy but didn’t hurt, I had no motivation to get out of bed and wanted to just spend all morning doubting every single decision I’ve made instead of actually getting up—it was rough. But I needed to get up. There were things I needed to do and I only had nine days left to figure out what I wanted to do about our new neighbors.

But for now, I opened up the world map and claimed our new tiles.

Well, I was about to.

Then I realized we had twenty-four influence. To spend.

Even half that would have surprised me considering that I forgot to take into consideration that our daily influence gains doubled by getting Mount Hound. Then, I was focused on thinking about our new neighbors that I forgot to spend any influence claiming new tiles yesterday. That meant we had two days’ worth of influence to spend.

That was a lot.

With it, I was able to claim another Lava Lake tile and then three more Basalt Plains tiles. That brought us right next to the volcano we were going for with two tiles adjacent to it while reaching twenty-one total tiles, meaning that our per-tile influence cost went up to six.

We needed six influence to claim the volcano still.

And that was exactly what we had leftover after claiming the four tiles before it.

We finally got our volcano tile for New Liberty, and that was just the icing on the cake after claiming four tiles before it on the same day.

Now to look at New Liberty’s stats.

I definitely liked what I could see. We did temporarily go up to three population units, but we just got that Settler unit, so now we were back down to two. We had one population free, which was our base pop that stayed with the settlement and couldn’t be spent, and then the Volcano Hounds at the Hounds’ Hunting Grounds. The two in the brackets represented our total population count.

And from what I could figure out, going from one unit of population to two cost fifty food. Two to three cost seventy-five. Three to four, a hundred, and so on. Maybe that would increase later on, but each pop of unit cost twenty-five more food than the one before it. That meant we’d be able to grow our population pretty quickly. If there was only a single day left until we got our third population unit again, then we’d potentially get the fourth in another day.

And with almost a hundred labor per day… we could pump out a new Volcanic Predator unit every two days, and then the leftover labor would give us the next in just a single day. So two days, one day, two days, one day… we could get six more of them within the next nine days. Given that we already had two of them, that would bring us up to eight of the Volcanic Predator units by the time that it would be clear I was bullshitting. That would be enough for a full stack at our current military group unit cap and then we’d be able to halfway fill up another one.

We could even set it up so that Mount Hound worked on a unit, too. That would take us up to nine, though I would rather that settlement work on its own buildings to boost its stats up. It would take them the same amount of time to produce one of those units as it would take us to produce eight of them.

Maybe, just maybe, my bullshittery wouldn’t have to be pure bullshit. What if we actually could steal that settlement from them? Ultimately, that would be the best result since they’re warmongers and that settlement is earning them the best possible resource they could use. If we take the settlement from them in nine days, then they might not ever even get to gain any resources from it since they would have to build Gathering Camps and grow enough population units to staff them.

But if we take longer than that, they’re going to be able to tap into that resource, and we might not be able to handle them if they get enough of it to equip their troops.

What it was really going to come down to was whether or not they were investing into building a military already. Maybe they thought they’d be alone for a while and focused on creating new settlements and building the regular buildings, or maybe they already prepared a military to rush the first new faction they met.

We’d probably be finding out soon.

But the more I thought about it, the more tempted I was to make my bullshit threat a legitimate threat.

That meant it was time to talk to myself to figure out the plan. “What if… once the Volcanic Predators are done escorting the Settler, they go east and look for their capital? Or maybe find some of their units to ambush. Try to harass them up in that direction. If we can harass them up there, we might be able to trick them into thinking we actually care about that area and make them think we’re bullshitting about their settlement next to ours, and then actually go take it after all. But he might see through that. Regardless, we should find out where their capital is if possible. And since these Volcano Hounds don’t seem to mind being thrown into battle since it’s all just a game to them… I would still feel bad, but throwing them against one of their units just to see how they fare might be smart. In the meantime, I could claim even more tiles around New Liberty to boost our labor income even higher to maybe get even more units.”

It sounded like a good plan to me, at least.