The steaks that Thad grilled for us using meat from the fire cattle were incredible. Steaks of that quality with that freshness would have cost a serious amount of cash back on Earth, but they were free and abundant here now that we had access to the fire cattle. Honestly, I felt guilty about eating them for free. They absolutely deserved being paid for, and Thad deserved a large tip on top of whatever he deserved in payment.

And because I was thinking about tipping him, that was what I ended up thinking about until I fell asleep: tipping practices.

I understood why many people weren’t happy about the whole custom of tipping. It was a financial obligation on top of the cost of the food itself. Not only that, but workers needed tips in order to survive since they often didn’t make enough money at their hourly rate to live off of without tips.

But at the same time, tips were often in cash, and cash was under the table. It was supposed to be taxed, but who reported tips to the IRS? I wouldn’t have ever done that and I would gladly encourage all tipped workers to not do so either.

However, then there was the issue of employers using the fact that their employees made tips to not pay them a living wage by default, which I wasn’t supportive of in the slightest. Tips should be complimentary rewards for extraordinary service on top of a serious wage. That way, people feel less obligated to leave tips even for poor service, employees are encouraged and inspired to work even harder, and employers can’t get away with underpaying their workers.

If I really became in charge of everything, I would want to make businesses pay their employees fair wages.

But at the same time, if I really did become in charge of everything… the whole point was to guarantee freedom. Would it really be freedom if I enforced my will over things like that? Even if something like better labor laws, which was more or less regarded as an objectively positive thing, was all that I did with my potential power, that would still be taking away their freedoms.

I wanted to live in a world full of total freedom, but I also wanted everybody to want to be moral, ethical people. I didn’t want to have to force people to behave. There isn’t anything free about forcing others to act a certain way.

Needless to say, my thoughts about tipping practices developed into far more than just that.

Where was the line for freedom drawn?

Even within the “game,” I always talked freedom up and encouraged everybody to live as freely as they could within it. But in the end, I had to force them to work for me if we wanted any chance of survival and winning.

It was ironic. Forcing one’s will was required to obtain freedom. Then there was the fact that, even if I did win and earn the ability to grant humanity true freedom, we would, realistically, either blow ourselves up or ruin the planet’s habitability.

Maybe true freedom was impossible in the first place. Or if not impossible, unrealistic. What if somebody wanted to murder somebody else? Telling them no, murder isn’t allowed, is taking away their freedom. But to allow it takes away the victim’s freedom to not be murdered. In the end, somebody is always subjected to somebody else’s will. So, what really is freedom? Is freedom simply having the most individual will possible with the least external forces acting on it as possible?

I wasn’t entirely sure, but that was the conclusion I at least temporarily came to before falling asleep.

Aside from all of that, the Volcano Hounds were especially happy with the grilled meat. It was like a whole new world opened up before their eyes—a world where meat could have more flavor and texture than in its raw state.

Fortunately, we had plenty of steaks—more than enough for everybody. What was supposed to be a short little dinner ended up becoming an entire dinner get together with everybody where Thad was happy to grill us all up a bunch of steaks to go through our stockpile of it. Considering we got enough steaks for all of us every single day thanks to the hunting, we got to have a huge feast.

Then again, could it really be considered a feast if our only food was steak and our only beverage was water? Feasts typically imply something greater than that. A variety of food and drinks. That question was potentially an even greater question than the ones about freedom.

That aside, it was a new day which meant there was more work to do. I started it off by opening up the world map first thing, just like every morning.

And the first thing that I saw wasn’t exactly good.

Whether they were coming to defend their settlement or closing in on our unit, I didn’t know, but I did know that we needed to get our unit back into the safety of our territory. Two different units of the Viking Elves were within sight to the south and northeast of their capital. Between the fact that they had two and we only had one, and that I couldn’t check on their units to see how stacked they were, I didn’t feel confident in any dreams about suddenly swooping in and taking their capital.

That meant I gave the order to pull back our northern unit to our nearest settlement.

Now, considering that their units seemingly came out of nowhere, that reminded me of our limited vision regarding the world map. Only units within three tiles of our territory and our own units were visible. That meant there was a ton of opportunity for them to hide in the spots where we couldn’t see them. Of course, that also applied to us. We could easily keep a large force hidden at Mount Hound that would be more or less invisible to them, and we would always be able to seem them approach us before they could detect our units. It was possible to hide an entire invasion force just out of sight of them, then spring it against their settlement with zero warning.

Well, aside from the warning that I gave them when I threatened them.

That aside, next came claiming new tiles for Mount Hound.

Five new tiles, bringing Mount Hound up a total of nineteen tiles.

What I wanted to do was grab the two easy features bordering our territory, and then expand a bit more to the south to work toward the other features in that direction while getting more labor.

As for the new features we got:

I was never going to complain about more science and influence. As for the Fertile Soil one, I figured that was essentially just a reskin of the Volcanic Soil modifier. Though, the Volcanic Soil modifier came with a single point of science in addition to the four points of food.

Part of me felt a little smug about that. All because of one single point of science. It probably had to do with the bias I felt over starting in a volcanic region and it being our very first modifier.

Volcanic supremacy.

Now, there wasn’t much to do aside from wait for more Volcanic Predators to finish construction—training, rather. In a normal 4X game, nobody would blink at saying that one had to “construct” new workers or warriors. But when dealing with actual people who were training to become Volcanic Predators, it felt strange to refer to them as being “constructed” or “built” even though that was how the system still referred to the process.

“Time to look at the research tree,” I said. I wasn’t sure what else to do.

Now, thanks to our somewhat absurd income of science, we sped through the tree in no time at all.

Tanning, Leatherworking, Basic Tools, Mining, Foraging, Trapping, Animal Husbandry, Agriculture, and Working Animals.

That was everything I queued up, and it was all done now. Of course, there wasn’t much I could do with any of it yet because New Liberty and Mount Hound were dedicated to training Volcanic Predators, but familiarizing myself with our new options after queuing up the next research would be a good idea.

As for new research…

There were two more research options that I could scroll down to. One for Group Tactics and another for Logging. The former talked about a unit modification while the latter mentioned getting to build tile modifiers, presumably on forest tiles or other tiles with trees.

For the time being, though, since I wanted to focus on our population, I went for Irrigation and Food Preparation. Both of those would finish within a day due to us having forty-nine research. After that, I queued up Preservation which would likely be the last of our food-boosting technologies in the first era, then Group Tactics followed up by Warrior Training. If our Volcano Hounds couldn’t use weapons, I assumed they probably wouldn’t exactly be able to use mounts, either. But they could be trained to be even better warriors, presumably.

Now, it might have been better to go for Group Tactics and Warrior Training first, and to have done those before everything else I just researched, since they might have directly affected what we were already working on. Despite all the technologies we finished researching, I wasn’t using any of them yet due to us focusing on producing military units.

But even if they were researched and capable of improving our units, they wouldn’t do so for free. Better options equaled higher labor costs equaled more time spent training our units, and I was more concerned about pumping out as many units as possible at the moment. Besides, they could always be upgraded later on. Even with researching those after the last of our food-related technologies, we would still have another two days remaining before we reached the ten-day limit on our original threat which we had units queued up for to fill that entire time.

Considering how that only took up the next two days, though, I went and queued up the rest of the tree to blitz through it.

Irrigation, Food Preparation, Group Tactics, Warrior Training, Herbal Remedies, Logging, Woodworking, Bowyer, Ceramics, Storage, Construction, Cloth Production, Weaving, Tailoring, Riding, Mounted Hunters, and Mounted Warriors.

That was the order for the rest of our available technologies. Given just how much science we were gaining, I figured we might as well unlock everything in the first era before moving on to the second. That would give us a strong foundation to build off of.

With all that being settled, I figured it was time to go on a morning run and then get some breakfast. Breakfast as in even more steak.

There was nothing like having steak for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every single day. Nobody with a functioning mind could ever get tired of that.

So, I got up and walked over to my tent’s entrance only to get interrupted by a message popping up in front of me.

I couldn’t help but to sweat when I read that. Somewhere else in the game’s world was a faction that not only wiped out somebody else this early in the game, but was now significantly stronger for it. Taking a quarter off of unit production time while also boosting their damage and defense was massive. Unless there was a way for us to gain a similar bonus to our own units, whichever faction acquired that might just end up having a military objectively stronger than everybody else in the game. At least, when it came to individual units. In that case, we had to hope that they didn’t have good labor and food to support pumping out a large military.

Then again… if it was so early in the game and they accomplished that, they probably already had a strong income in those regards. Either that, or they were next to a total pushover who didn’t put even the slightest bit of defense.

Regardless, that wasn’t a great message to start the day off with. At least I could probably assume they weren’t close to us since we already had the Viking Elves next to us. Considering just how massive the map was, it wouldn’t have made sense for us to all be so closely packed together. We were likely spread out across the map in clusters so that we’d have neighbors, but also be far away from the rest of the factions.

More importantly, I wanted to get one of those era achievements myself if they gave such good rewards for it. But as far as I could tell, there was no way to figure out which achievements were available. The others might have some ideas about potential achievements, though, given their knowledge of past games. As long as they had at least an idea about what sort of achievements there usually were, that gave me a potential direction to go in.

Maybe I would get one for researching all of the technologies in the first era? I was also close to reaching a total of fifty tiles spread across our settlements.

I wasn’t thinking about milestones like that before, but I was going to have to start to if there were rewards that impressive for acquiring them.

Though, thinking about that, I realized that there weren’t any “wonders” yet. The kind of wonders that could be constructed only once in an entire game and would usually give some long-term bonuses for finishing them before anybody else could. Maybe they were only available starting in the next era? Given how good our labor was, that was something I was interested in pursuing.

But for now, reaching fifty total tiles and researching everything in the first era sounded like good milestones to reach. So did reaching the second era. Honestly, there might not even be one for getting all the techs to instead be one that goes to whoever reaches the second era first.

I needed to talk to the others about it to see what their thoughts were.

As far as I could tell, I only needed Logging, Woodworking, and then Construction in order to unlock the technology that would start off the next era. Everything else was a bonus. So, maybe going for that and then finishing up the first era was the better idea.

“Well, I’ll ask the others about it,” I said to myself. “Looks like we’re going to have a morning meeting. Maybe I’ll be able to talk them into going on a run with me afterward.”