The stress must have been getting the better of me since I was aiming for goals that were already completed. I was planning on shooting for fifty total tiles within our faction to see if that would unlock one of the era achievements… but we already had over fifty tiles. We had fifty-four, and that was before claiming even more tiles on the nineteenth day.

Or maybe I was letting myself get too distracted. After all, once I was done with gathering information the day before, I ended up spending most of the day flirting on and off with Zira and Enna. Never at the same time, though I probably should have just to test their reactions to that.

And by the end of the day, I felt like a piece of garbage for flirting with two different women. I doubted that Zira would care, honestly. I figured that Zira would probably be more than happy to join a threesome with me and Enna if anything. But Enna? I had no idea what her feelings were about that sort of thing. I could tell that she liked me and I liked her, but there was no denying my attraction to Zira, either. Ever since she opened up and started acting friendly, I found myself unable to not check out her body since it was always on display. She was never nude or anything, but her natural sense of fashion left barely anything to the imagination.

Regardless, I found myself in a situation that might potentially lead to drama if I let things continue as they were. It was a problem entirely brought on by myself, too.

As much as my old man raised me to be a decisive man who took action, and as good as I was at that when it came to strategy games, I had to admit I was never good at that when it came to women. Or rather… I never struggled to get women into bed. What I struggled with was liking multiple women at the same time and not being able to decide which one I liked more. The one time I brought two women together, let them know that I was sleeping with both of them, and asked them if they would be interested in a relationship where we all dated each other—well, that was probably the hardest I ever got slapped in the face.

In my defense, I wasn’t in a relationship with either of them. I only went on a couple of dates with them both and had sex with each of them once. That sort of thing, as far as I knew, was normal when in the market looking for a partner. Then again, that probably didn’t really have anything to do with it. What I most likely did wrong was ask them to meet me at the same time and then tried to date both of them together.

That probably wasn’t a good tactic to try out again. Not to mention that even if I did and I managed to hook up with both of them, what then? I was going to be an independent leader who has hooked up with two of my colleagues. People would probably end up thinking that I’m taking advantage of my position, take me less seriously, and so on.

The best choice for me, realistically, was to drop any ideas of hooking up with anybody. All that would do is complicate things. And all of that was assuming we stayed together. If we broke up for whatever reason, or if things just went sour in general, then the situation could get awkward pretty fast seeing as how none of us had a way to leave aside from… well, permanent death. At least, me, Enna, and Zira alongside the other demons had no way of leaving.

There was too much at stake to be worrying about those sorts of relationships. Then again…

Is there anything more American than finding love even when facing the loss of all your freedoms?

Is there anything more American than the pursuit of love even while against overwhelming odds and the potential loss of ownership over Earth?

Is there anything more American than doing what I want, when I want, regardless of the situation?

Americans have always had the reputation of being selfish assholes who only care about themselves. And to be fair, that’s pretty true. We value our individual desires above all else most of the time. It was both good and bad, but it was ultimately what earned us our freedom.

That’s right, I thought to myself.

To reject my feelings and run away from the women would have been to raise a white flag in surrender during the war of romance.

And I was a man who would never surrender, for I was—am, American.

As previously mentioned, my only kryptonite is Vietnamese rice farmers. No amount of American spirit can overcome their ways.

And as far as I was concerned, love was not a Vietnamese rice farmer, and neither were Enna nor Zira.

But before I could think about a strategy to deal with Enna and Zira, I needed to deal with the more immediate priorities for the day. For example, claiming new territory.

First was claiming that tile with a feature below Mount Hound. That brought Mount Hound up to twenty total tiles which me ant that any more tiles would cost six influence each, leaving us with sixteen influence to spend.

As for that new feature we claimed, it was nice but nothing too important. I just figured we should get all of the features close to us that are easy to get.

I had no idea how sand could be spicy, but I wasn’t going to turn down an extra point of science.

Now, with sixteen influence left still, I was torn on how to spend it. We’d get the most value out of it by spending it on the northern settlement, but I wasn’t sure we were going to be keeping that one still. It would be best if we could, though, and it was still possible that there was an era achievement for acquiring a specific amount of tiles. If there was, claiming new tiles where they were cheap was the best route to go.

So, without any better, more immediate tiles to claim… why not invest in the north?

That got us five more tiles in total, including one with a feature while bringing a massive boost to the settlement’s food production. Just claiming four new Grassland tiles brought the settlement twenty-four more food per day. The new feature we claimed was also another Fertile Soil modifier, so that meant, in total from the four new Grassland tiles and one new Savannah tile, that the settlement’s food income grew by thirty-three. That officially meant Hylrmenel had the highest food income out of all the settlements… while still also having a labor income that was pathetically small. I wasn’t sure how we were going to deal with that, either.

From what information I had to work with, it seemed like the only way to ever get Hylrmenel into a position where it had decent labor would be to build as many labor-boosting tile modifications as possible, basically sacrificing the ability to build anything else up there.

But if there was potentially a way in the future to transfer population between settlements, it wouldn’t really matter. It could happily stay as a food-focused settlement that just pops out new population to spread to send to the others. Then again, something like that might be too broken and not allowed.

Not to mention that, if the system was like other 4X games, then we would eventually reach a point where the other settlements would have higher food production just from the buildings that they’re able to pump out with their high labor.

Hylrmenel might have had incredible food production, but it needed to be properly balanced if it wanted a good future in the long run.

Of course, there was also the potential option of eventually getting to absorb the surrounding cities into New Liberty. If that was possible, then it wouldn’t matter since it would just inherit the combined labor output of New Liberty and Mount Hound.

If there was a way to merge our settlements together in the next tier of research, that was probably going to be my number one priority. It still bothered me having multiple settlements even if I knew that it was for our own good.

Connecting all of the settlements together wouldn’t even be that difficult if we could claim the last two settlements of the Viking Elves. It would be easy to link each settlement together to form a sort of backwards C on the map.

That aside, the unit I had to the north to stand by around Hylrmenel had something to do that I kept on putting off.

I queued up the order for them to move on top of the Grazing Fields modifier adjacent to Hylrmenel so that they could try hunting for beasts up there. That tile modifier had some flavor text that made it sound like there should be some game there to hunt for, so I wanted to confirm if that would really be the case.

Aside from that, there wasn’t really anything else for me to do. Research was underway, the settlements all had their building orders, I burnt through our influence for the day, and there weren’t any battles to oversee.

“I wonder how much influence it would be to claim new tiles once we merge the settlements, if we can,” I said out loud to myself before doing a bit of mental math.

If the price for new tiles went up by two every ten tiles…

It would be fourteen influence per tile with all of our current settlements at their current sizes. However, if we claimed the other two Viking Elf cities and used those to link all of our settlements together…

Twenty-two influence per tile.

Sure, we’d be boosting our influence gain by capturing those other settlements, but still. That was a lot. Though, at the same time, we would still be able to get almost one tile every single day. For what felt like a lot of influence, that probably said something about how decent our influence income was considering that we would still be able to grow that quickly even with so many tiles claimed.

With that question out of the way with, I figured out what else I should be thinking about.

Future plans. Specifically, future plans for after the Viking Elves. Both the mountains and ocean had tiles and modifiers that I wanted, especially the ocean. And, if possible, I still wanted us to get revenge against those giant crabs at some point. Especially considering that they were spawning roaming units in that area which we would eventually need to deal with anyways.

The arctic region was a bust until we had a means of making use of it, so I wasn’t interested in claiming any tiles over there.

There might be some good tiles and biomes in the undiscovered, neighboring regions, but that would just stretch us out even more and I wanted to start really capitalizing on what we already had to work with since we already had plenty of good options.

The only thing hard to decide on was whether to invest more in the mountains or ocean first. And the more I thought about it… the less difficult of a decision that was. The ocean, especially due to that Leviathan Hunting Grounds biome, made it feel like the best choice by far. Each one of those tiles offered thirteen food. There were thirty-one tiles in total. That meant we could get four hundred and three food just from claiming all of those tiles, and that was massive. That wasn’t counting any of the modifiers over there, either.

The downside was that we wouldn’t be growing our labor at all while pursuing the food in the ocean.

But ultimately, I would rather have food and a huge population over labor. Our labor was already good enough to pump out units at a fast rate. What we needed was a large population to sustain that. Not to mention that population was also required for staffing tile modifications which I wanted to build plenty of in order to gain access to more materials, food, and labor.

Really, Hylrmenel’s food focus might not even be needed depending on our future ability to maximize our gains from the ocean.

I sighed and stretched before walking over to my tent’s entrance, pushing aside the opening flap to check on the weather. It was dark, cloudy, and hot like usual. The former two were alright, but not that last part.

“Maybe we should invest in the arctic region after all so that we can live somewhere cold,” I said. Though, the Demons and Volcano Hounds probably wouldn’t appreciate that.

Then again, claiming territory over there wasn’t required for me to actually walk over there and spend some time in the snow.

That sounded like a good idea for a break from the heat.