Elas placed the crown on his head then laid back in bed. The crown told him that he just needed to clear his mind which he interpreted as meditation.

Elas had done some meditation before or at least he believes he had. He never really felt any form of zen or some other special state of mind others say they experience. He made himself comfortable and controlled his breathing as he tried to empty his thoughts.

Elas saw himself laying on his bed. An old man with long white hair and beard. His gray robe was messy and stained with a worrying amount of alchemical ingredients no doubt a result of his fumbling about while preparing the ritual reagents. He floated upwards away from his body slowly at first but it quickly picked up speed. He found himself phasing through the roof and soaring into the skies until he could see the entire hill where his cabin was located.

His hilltop cabin looked picturesque as he observed it from a bird's-eye view. It truly did look like the game with the entire hill bathed in blue light to denote night-time.

He could see everything with such clarity which was simply impossible at night. When he focused his attention he could even see a rabbit walking about in the snow and rare non-migratory birds sleeping among the branches of a tree.

At the height he was currently viewing the hill such details should be invisible to the human eye but the crown's power was not constrained by mortal vision. If he wanted to, he could count every single snowflake on the hill.

This is definitely far more detailed than the game ever was. He thought to himself as he marvelled at the sights and sounds.

What was apparent was he only had a clear view of the hill. Farhaven along with the rest of the world was covered by fog. Elas expected this as it was one of the more unique mechanics of The Final Crown. Unlike most 4X games, few sovereigns in The Final Crown started with a settlement they owned. Elas was not the ruler of Farhaven and so his crown did not have dominion over it.

Currently Farhaven was the domain of baron Rein while Elas is officially just a member of his elder council. He had left the imperial court more than half a century ago and with it most of his political power.

Unlike most other 4x games The Final Crown only gave the players vision of their domain and very strictly only their domain. Everything outside of areas they own would be in the fog of war. Players also lose vision of areas they own that become contested. Armies also did not extend the vision range as such one had to rely on reports in order to deduce the situation.

The game developers sold it as a battle realism feature stating that commanders didn't have omniscient vision over battlefields but everyone knew it was because they simply didn't finish the live battle component of the game. There were small battles which they managed to implement but actual large scale army live combat was simply never there. Instead battles were text-based with delayed combat reports arriving to the player based on their distance from the battlefield and the robustness of their courier network.

Elas wouldn't know how any of this would translate to this world until he experiences them himself. Even in the game itself it was incredibly complicated to calculate how large a force needs to be in order to contest a region and effectively disable an enemy sovereign's omni-vision. It was widely believed to be based on the host computers spec with a hard limit at around 200 combatants. How exactly would that translate to this world? One could only guess.

Elas tried to access the other view modes which he managed by just thinking of activating them. The world turned into a sea of gray, blues, and greens as he entered the mana view. This was primarily for placing buildings and structures that tap into the rivers of mana that snaked through the world.

The hill was mostly bluish gray denoting that the entire landscape had weak but omnipresent mana. This was far better than the dead gray one would find in most of the world as more developed magical infrastructure tends to redirect the mana rivers into themselves for their own needs. Here in the depths of the northern taiga the bounty of nature although faint was still present.

Thin blue veins of mana were spread all over the hill, each one leading back to his cabin. The veins were proof that his mana condensing artifacts were working and constantly pumping the surrounding mana into his abode for easier access. The cabin itself glowed green with respectably dense mana. A result of both mana artifacts and the rather impressive amount of magical materials stored inside.

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Elas knew a great number of mages that would kill for an artifact that was capable of observing the flow of mana with this ease and accuracy. And this was simply one of the crown's many powers. Heck in the game this was all just flavor text as having an aerial view and various informative filters was expected for a game with a city building component.

There was also a water access view showing all renewable sources of water on the hill which was unsurprisingly gray as he was far from the town's river. Subfaction view showed the territories of sub factions within your own domain. Wind, Temperature, Humidity, Plague, and several other very specific filters were available.

There really wasn't much to see given his domain was just a hill with a cabin on top. He will no doubt find use for all of them once he reaches a point when domain management becomes of paramount importance.

Elas willed the crown's vision to focus on himself and focused on his body trying to select himself to see his stats like in the game. It worked but instead of bringing up a menu filled with text and numbers his body turned into a gray outline with a complex multicolored shape floating in his chest. The shape was unfathomably complicated in fact he was certain that it went beyond three dimensions. But even so he understood. It was basically an incredibly complex multidimensional graph of all his capabilities and talents.

This feature was the single most important ability available to him in the early game as he needed to find people that will help him in his quest for world domination. Now he only needed to find a way to get talented people to step into his domain or to get dominion over them so he could observe them.

The early game centric sovereigns start with territory already under their control and he needed to start his own build up if he did not want to be trampled by their accelerated pace.

This was even more true for the wooden crown as it just so happens that one of the most powerful early game sovereigns started in the northern regions. The warrior sovereign was an early game menace that starts off as the leader of a warlike northern hill tribe. The war crown which he wields had a grand total of zero economy related buffs and everything in military and personal strength. His game plan was war and his economy plunder. The win condition was steamrolling everyone before late game kicks in and he gets stomped by late game powerhouses.

The wooden crown was the exact opposite. The faction falls under the late game focused sim city school of strategy. Which meant he was supposed to hunker down and slowly build up his holdings.

The wooden crown takes this idea to the extreme by having only two abilities. The main ability was a scaling passive that increased the fertility of people within his domain by an honestly absurd amount. The ability was very straightforward. It makes people make more people and the more people there are the greater the bonuses become. Part of the bonus also reduces gestation time to the point that by the late game one could expect a baby to be born in four months or even less.

The passive sounds extremely powerful and it was. More births meant more mages, more talents and more bodies to throw at the meat grinder of war. The problem was nowhere in that passive was any bonuses to managing and caring for a large and rapidly increasing population which meant it was basically a double sided blade that would implode the faction if not managed correctly.

People don't just make babies whenever the option is available so even a fivefold increase in fertility doesn't translate to the same increase in births. He had to convince people that multiplying was a good idea. Good thing the war and tumult of the coming decades would naturally increase peoples babymaking. As strange as it sounds, hard times tend to result in more children.

The active ability allows Elas to borrow a portion of his surrounding peoples strength. A powerful ability for sure but the conversion rate was horrendous and if he was traveling with his army then using the ability was essentially weakening his own men.

If the warrior sovereign was playing optimally then Elas might as well already be dead. There simply isn't much the wooden crown can do if the war crown rushes Farhaven. Elas had to gamble that the warrior sovereign himself was not a player or at least wasn't a good one.

The true optimal strategy of playing as the wooden crown faction was to use Elas to train an apprentice that would replace him come mid game. This was because Elas was not only old but he was too old. He was the only sovereign in the game that starts with a lifespan that was not enough to reach the end game. Life extending methods may not be that rare in Eterna but Elas in particular had exhausted most of his options and the few that still remain would have him derail drastically from meta strategies. It was simply too expensive to extend his life. Not that he had a choice, he was Elas not the wooden crown. There was little point in world domination if he couldn't rule after it.

The entire reason Elas had even left the capital was to hunt down materials that could further extend his life. In some ways he was successful having extended his life by decades after he left the capital but that also meant there were now fewer items that could extend his lifespan. Elas starts the game with a little over 10 years left in his life and that was if he took perfect care of his health. There was no way he would have time to be the symbol for perfect healthcare while also conquering the world.

Elas removed the crown from his head, terminating the vision. He had a lot of things to do if he was to win it all. But for now it was time to sleep. Tomorrow he needed to get properly used to his body lest he mess up the ritual the day after. The game played much faster than his life here. Afterall in gameplay entire days passed in seconds. He had time to plan his next move.