I ended up learning that the male Volcano Hounds were just as playful and disregarding of personal space as the females. It was really… something else to occasionally be tackled by a large, barely clothed, halfway-to-being-a-furry, wolflike person equipped with huge, deadly claws while wearing basically zero clothes.

Thankfully, they seemed more interested in me than the Demons. I didn’t want the Demons to have to deal with the Volcano Hounds’ hyper energy. They had enough going on.

As for me, I was young enough that my back could handle being randomly tackled.

Somewhat.

I still went to bed with a sore back and dreams that the next day wouldn’t be as bad.

Speaking of the next day, I was getting into a good habit of opening up the world map as soon as I woke up every single morning. I wanted to claim new tiles as early in the day as possible now that there was another faction nearby. I had to beat them to the good tiles, after all.

We got the next two creature tiles claimed and our Spearmen/Hunter unit made of Demons was almost home. Once they got back, I just wanted to set them to garrison in our settlement to serve as a final defensive line while keeping them safe from everything that would like to permanently kill them.

At the same time, it felt wrong to do that. The Volcano Hounds were out there more than ready to throw their lives away for us as long as it meant having fun, apparently. But they wanted to do it, plus they wouldn’t permanently die. They still had a home to return to.

Even so, it felt wrong protecting one class of people while throwing the lives of another class at all of our problems.

It felt to American too me. American in the United States of America way, not American American.

That aside, New Liberty was only two tiles away from our per-tile cost going up to eight influence each. So, with six influence left for the day, I switched over to Mount Hound and claimed those lava lake tiles I was interested in the day before.

As it turned out, we weren’t the only ones expanding our territory. That Viking Elf faction went and claimed four more tiles of their own, and it looked like they were trying to work up toward that Death Fungus modifier. If that was their plan, I couldn’t blame them. I just had to hope that they weren’t going to be able to weaponize it yet. The last thing we needed was to go up against somebody with the best possible material for their units this early in the game who also just so happened to have deadly poison to go along with them.

More importantly, the fact that they were spending influence on their new settlement meant that they were either calling my bluff or confident in their ability to defend the settlement against us.

The news didn’t stop there, and it was about to take a turn for the worst when I looked at our northern unit heading to settle new tiles.

The bastards settled another settlement exactly where I wanted to, not that I could blame them for it. It was an incredibly good spot thanks to that science.

But now it was in the hands of our opponent. They didn’t just claim one of the rare biomes around us, but two of them.

It didn’t matter how lucky we were with our biome spawns if somebody else beat us to actually claiming them as territory.

But at the same time as that was bad news for us, there was also good news.

What looked like another faction’s unit was to the northwest. Examining it, I was informed that it belonged to an unidentified minor faction.

Their settlement must have been tucked up in that corner of the map, and we probably didn’t notice before due to not going north enough.

If we could get ourselves another minor faction, then that would be a huge boost to us.

But wait.

We could only assimilate a single minor faction without more research and buildings to expand that. I remember having that explained to me. So, even if there was another minor faction up there, we wouldn’t be able to assimilate them yet.

And when I looked at our research tree, it didn’t look like there were any options available at our tech level for expanding our total assimilated minor factions.

I didn’t want to give the Viking Elves an option to assimilate the minor faction, and I didn’t want to let them have those science-boosting tiles as it might give them an edge in technology over us.

Meanwhile, I had two Volcanic Predator units and a Settler unit made of Volcano Hounds just south of their new settlement. They could easily reach it the next day and potentially take over.

I was never a huge warmonger in 4X games as I preferred to take neutral-to-peaceful routes toward victory, but I did always like to reassert my dominance every now and then to show people that I could take them out if I wanted to.

It would also be a good idea to learn how settlement warfare works. I would rather learn that while on the offensive than the defensive. It might also piss them off and make them want to reclaim it, shifting their attention away from their settlement next to Mount Hound.

That might just work.

Conquer their new settlement, divert their forces away from their southern settlement to the one taken from them, then conquer their southern settlement and hold it. I would rather deprive them of that Living Wood than the science, not to mention get that Living Wood for our own uses.

I just needed to run my idea by the others first. Unless they could talk me out of it, I was seriously considering ordering our unit to the north to attack that new settlement and take it over for us.