Your Imperial Majesty, nobles of Merlot,
First let me thank your Excellence on entrusting me the important responsibility of Imperial Mathematician. Time for the flourishing speachs seems indeed be in past so let me get straight to the point.
If any of the Merlot court feels strong calling to mathematical studies, please send me a private message and I will find you a place in Imperial Mathematical Seminar. All others are obviously also welcome to share their mathematical insights. You don't have to have a licence to count
However, I'd like to ask everyone that before engaging in lengthy calculations and I am online, please send me a message first just to make sure we won't waste time doing the same calculations. If you need any more complex calculations done for the Empire, please let me know I'll try my utmost to find the solution.
I shall start my work immediately doing calculations on short and long term possibilites of our capital assuming we settle down just where we stand. If you my Liege or you Sir Donovan Zoi would require anything specific counted, let me know and I will get into it as soon as possible.
Let me also share couple of comments about our starting position. If I'm not horribly mistaken, it seems that two positions to the east from our settler there is plains hill and right north from there would be forest. This is based on what can be seen from the hidden space. So moving warrior to east would only reveal whether there is any extra resources in the hill or not. That probably wouldn't be enough to persuade us to move away. However, I agree that there probably is no need to rush in the cartographing since the cottages are off. So either way I don't see much difference between moving E or NE.
Ash88 has done a great job in the initial analysis. I would also suggest going for either for meditation or polytheism. As Ash said, there would be added benefit of being a step closer to montheism if we start with polytheism. However, the positive side of going for meditation is getting monasterys early. Temples we probably won't need as soon, since we have gems in vicinity to appease the common folks for a while. There actually is another possibility aside from Isabella for someone being faster to the technology. If there is wine or elephants next to a river, it would be faster for even a non-financial civilization to get to the meditation/polytheism. However the rush is more likely to end up in a tie. If that happens I believe the one with more overhead will win. In this case it would be tie on that merit too, so I think the religion would then be randomly assigned. All being said, I'm leaning a bit towards to polytheism but meditation is not a bad choice either.
Respecfully,
Aivoturso
PS. I look also forward in working together with Sir Donovan Zoi and join in his thanks to Sir Hercules90.