I was slightly worried about some arcane problem with wine cropping up (there might be a pun to be made here), but it all works admirably. The magic word is
babel
Capital founded; build queue set to boat, research set to Hunting (8t) as per the slow-build plan. Also placed a sign to remind me of swapping the tile to pcow on T1. I left the scout unmoved; a coastal tile is visible 11 of our position, bleeding fog suggests that it's not a one-tile lake. Do you want a screenshot?
Something I've only learned recently: for the first five turns (up to T4), it's safe to end the scout's turn on flatland.
The most pressing issue, of course, is the naming scheme we'll employ. For the time being, the capital is named after a local legend, but I'd have no problem with changing it.
Sent scout 33 past rice/furs, revealed jungled riverside hill gems + silk. Twin rivers flow eastward. More jungle to the south. Lake blocks founding 3 of rice, making that site even more dubious.
All of your suggestions are topics I know next to nothing about, but the capital is now named Masakado. Not an emperor, but I make you a counter-offer of swordsmen with a mythical nimbus or (failed) revolt leaders.
I like the idea of naming after board games, too, if you're fine with providing the names, because all I could come up with is "chess" for every city, and even that is a somewhat-recent addition. From a cursory glance and from childhood acquaintances, though, we could have cities named Carcassonne (alright, the French have that too, damn them) and Rummikub. And Brass, knock on wood.
First mistake of the game: the scouting direction I picked. Post-IW and with the rice farm in place, we'll likely want to plant a commercial city 2 of scout (with lighthouse lake), but that's some 50-60t away.
Krill moved away from the plains hill on T0. I knew he wouldn't settle for the single seafood (well, it was also apparent from his Agri pick).
This may or may not be some kind of Donut coastline hand-drawn to look more rugged.
The city's name is Carcassonne, although the screenshot says otherwise. All aboard the board game theme.
Edit: Though I might have another one: hapax legomena in Shakespeare.
77 next for the scout, or do we dive into the jungle? We only really want to settle that way after Iron Working, and I think we won a trick on everyone by avoiding Agriculture, what a useless tech in this context.
How would you rank the Shakespearean words though, there are so many, and many of them excellent. Length?
Capital can build ships into both seas. Nice touch, Mardoc.
77 next. Locations adjacent to cow will mostly be scouted by expanding cultural borders, I figure. We'll scout the southeastern jungle after settling 2 of scout's position post-Agri/IW, which means no earlier than city #4. Eventually, we'll want to seal off and control the narrow 2-tile corridor we can see there.
Not everyone took an Agri civ, unfortunately -- Ethiopia (Dark Savant/ipecac), Russia (CML/mackoti?), Greece (Joey) and Mongolia (JR4/RefSteel) all start without it. But our precocious boat will probably give us an early food lead on dtay, Krill and Ventessel/Adrien.
For Shakespeare, we could just pick any word we like, as long as it appears only once, such as "Ames-Ace", "Princox" and "Hebenon". All of his words are here, with occurrences given:
I don't know if the listed appearances are exhaustive for every entry, though. Could always write a little program culling the raw-text corpus to ensure ourselves a comprehensive list, though. In fact, I think I'll do that over the weekend -- what better than some Shakespeare Statistics to keep the early game interesting.
I think the listed appearances are clearly not exhaustive. Is a raw-text Shakespearean corpus even a thing on the internet? That's pretty awesome, and let's go that way. We can always see what good old Will had to say on the phenomena appearing in the game too. Were we Commodore, there'd even be a story in it.
One thing that interests me is where the hell did Krill move to, there's nothing particularly alluring that I see, hopefully the next move will reveal something nice.
The plot is laid: if all things fall out right,
I shall as famous be by this exploit
As Scythian Tomyris by Cyrus' death.
Great is the rumor of this dreadful knight,
And his achievements of no less account:
To come again to Carthage.
Some of the brief licensing reminders in the middle of the text have not been removed for analysis because I'm lazy, but they repeat the same text over and over and, as I've checked, none of the words make an impact.
Note that the list is slightly faulty, because the resource uses hyphens interchangeably with dashes on occasion (which I find vexing on principle), resulting in "you-wondrous" being counted as a word and such (little to be done about that without proofreading the entire text), and the program will convert any rare space-omitting typo such as "AGAMEMNON.Worthy" into "agamemnonworthy" (it reads words by spaces and strips non-alphabetic characters...) -- and then there's inflected forms not being checked ("zephyrs" is on the list as a plural of a somewhat-rare word, for example -- although it actually counts because Will never used the singular!) -- but on the whole, it's something to work with. Some other entries are spawned by Katherine's French, etc.
The list breaks the character limit for posts twice, so I'll attach it as a file instead... 12,726 in total by this count. I had not expected quite that many, even considering the above.
![[Image: sBQA6YU.png]](http://i.imgur.com/sBQA6YU.png)
