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OK, so you guys decided on researching Seed Storage, building a mill foundry, and colonizing Terreth.
Turn Eight
Oh snap, my suspicions have been vindicated
Blue is to our southwest. We should start thinking about securing that particular frontier. This also means we probably don’t share a border with the Drakken, which kind of sucks, Drakken tend to make good neighbors.
Turn Nine
Fuuuck
Necrophages are basically our antithesis. We can’t make war, they can’t make peace. They have strong units throughout the entire game, we’re somewhat reliant on mercenaries that won’t really be coming online until we start getting our trade routes up.
I start moving our units to consolidate, I think we’ve done all the exploring we can reasonably do.
Turn Ten
I mentioned Empire Plans earlier.
What the hell is an empire plan? They’re your main influence sink, and consist of a series of passive bonuses. You have four trees or sectors that you can invest in: Military, Science and Industry, Empire, and Economy and Population. The divide is similar to what you see in the tech screen, but instead of being able to slot into which ever one you want in any order, you must unlock them in tiered order, and each successive tier is more expensive than the last. The plans also increase in cost proportional to the number of cities you have, so making sure that your influence production keeps up with inflation is an important part of city management.
So far, we only have access to the first tier of powers: +20% industry on units, +20% science, +2 vision, and +3 dust per citizen. I don’t find the empire one to be particularly compelling at this tier, so I typically go with either the military or the science, depending on whether or not I plan on pumping out units in the next ten turns or so. Every time empire plans come up, you start over from scratch, so there’s not really back-strategy or a long term commitment for any particular plan. Adjust them according to what you actually intend to do in the coming turns.
We currently only have enough influence to pick one thing. I’m going to go with Military. We’re going to be trying to push out at least one if not two more settlers in the next ten turns, as well as needing to bolster our actual armed forces to deal with the Necrophage threat.
Orange turns out to be Vaulters. Not the worst news.
Oh wait a second, motherfucker
They snatched Terreth out from under us! Now if we pacify the Gauran in Terreth, it’ll pay off for the Vaulters rather than for us. Damn.
Other bad news:
That’s a Necrophage army. Fully concentrated with its hero, ready to kill everything in its path. Kared is probably not safe for us to colonize for some time.
One last thing before we establish Utlana: luxury resources.
That orange highlighted box with the snowflake in the middle? Spices that we got from a quest. If we use those spices, all our cities get +50% food for the next five turns. The orange highlighting means it’s legal for us to use it. We’re going to do something slightly gamey here - if we use the booster before establishing a new city, it costs 10 spices. If we do it after establishing a second city, it’d cost 15, and thus we wouldn’t be able to afford it.
Utanla is established 
Turn Eleven
One of our Dervishes has been cut off and is being attacked by a roaming army.
I could fight this out and give a minor tutorial on how combat works, or I could take this opportunity to do something somewhat cheesy. This combat is complete suicide, so I’m going to retreat.
This halves the HP of the units that retreated, but that’s ok, they’re doomed.
So I sell them on the marketplace.
:bye:
Turn Twelve
We pacify the Gauran of Terreth, but the victory is bittersweet.
We’ll get around to using those dye to pacify the Sisters of Mercy in Utanla once Utanla finishes a Dervish.
Turn Thirteen
Oh shit, oh shit.
It’s here!
Winter has come! Everything sucks!
Specifically, this shit that happens
Units move at half speed, all income is murdered, we lose vision, and if we had trade routes they’d suffer an additional -25% on dust income for being a Roving Clans specific economic malus.
Winter in EL is a pretty big deal. Early on, summers are long, winters are short, and penalties are merely bad, but even at this stage of the game, winter is basically an end to any exploration and offensive operations. Later, you spend progressively more time in winter and the penalties get much harsher. This is an important theme of the game - Auriga is dying, and we only have a limited time to make our peace.