The first thing I queued up at our newest settlement, Hylrmenel, was the Workers’ Tent. The settlement was in desperate need of labor and wasn’t going to gain more without it.

I also felt a need to change the settlement’s name. It was… difficult to pronounce and even harder to remember its spelling.

Hi-lure-men-all.

Hylrmenel.

But there was no way I was ever going to do that. I had no interest in forcing my own cultural naming conventions onto them. The Viking Elves were the one who named that settlement in respect to their culture, and I wanted to respect that.

A good country worthy being proud of was a country that respected the differences of all within it. Names, food, traditions—culture existed to be respected and shared. Diverse cultures were what made the world interesting, and they were what would make our faction interesting.

Of course, if somebody had a cultural tradition of cannibalizing babies, that would be a different story. We might have to do something about that one. But otherwise, I didn’t want to change anything. I just wanted us to get along as equals.

Different, but equal.

That phrase got a lot of shit over the years. Some people said it trivialized issues while others said it made no sense, but I’ve always been fond of my interpretation of it.

We are all entitled to equal rights and opportunities, but our individual cultures and physiological differences make us—well, different. What makes us who we are makes us different. But no matter how different we are, we’re all still equal and deserve the same opportunities, freedoms, and rights.

That was why I wasn’t going to change that settlement’s name no matter how difficult it was to spell.

Now, with a new day, it was time to claim new territory.

We were up to nineteen influence a day thanks to our three settlements, and I really wanted to expand on our new settlements since New Liberty was already in a good position.

Mount Hound came first. I planned on focusing more defenses around Mount Hound and claiming the settlement adjacent to it, so I invested my influence into it to claim five more tiles. Five important tiles that would also prevent our enemy from getting into the mountains—or at least, claiming territory toward the mountains.

Four Woodland tiles, one with the Pond feature, and a Highlands tile.

We weren’t the only ones claiming new territory over there, either. Ull’s Chosen reached and claimed the Death Fungus feature. I didn’t know if they’d be able to actually make use of it anytime soon, but I had to hope they wouldn’t be able to. I didn’t want our units exposed to what would basically be chemical warfare for all of the obvious reasons.

Also, since I claimed territory within the forest region, I was pretty sure that meant they would be able to see our territory now. They might not be able to see our actual settlement without first coming into our region, but they would at least be able to see our stretch of territory reaching into their region.

But I didn’t care too much about that. What I wanted to do was cut off their access to the mountains. That entrance to the mountains was a good chokepoint which I wanted to make sure we got under our control. It was still possible for Ull’s Chosen to take a Settler past our claimed tiles to claim the inside of the mountain region, but we’d just take them out as soon as they tried.

One thing was for certain, though.

We both planned on staying in that forest region.

Thankfully, with two settlements dedicated to pumping out Volcanic Predators, our chances of pushing them out looked good. All we had to do was rush them and take them out before they could do the same to us. As long as we could push them out of the forest, I’d be happy. I wasn’t interested in trying to utterly eliminate them this early in the game yet. If I ended up feeling like that would be the best choice when we came to it, then sure. But until then, I was happy just pushing them out of the forest. Even happier if we could push them out of the forest and keep them away from that science we just took from them.

Speaking of science…

We were up to forty-seven a day.

If my math was right, that would be more than enough to instantly research every technology option in the first tier of research in a day each.

Rushing science was always a good strategy in 4X games, and it sure felt like that was exactly what we were doing as we sped through the research tree. We could already get two of the twenty-cost techs per day and could almost afford two of the twenty-five cost techs per day. Honestly, it was hard to believe that we weren’t at the top of the research game. I felt like we shouldn’t have already been able to so quickly research everything, but we were.

I had to ask the others about it to see if we were going faster than usual or if this was about standard. I also had to ask them about how it seemed like, even though we took control of an Ull’s Chosen settlement, we weren’t able to summon any of their population. I was only able to summon more Volcano Hounds at our new settlement.

But before I could go to do that, I ordered our northern unit to check out the minor faction to the west of them. Then they could head east to hunt for wherever the capital of Ull’s Chosen was.

And hopefully not run into any surprises on the way.