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the Barbarians that taught themselves to write and trade

In my Civilization knock-off, you can bribe a unit from another civilization into joining your side. If you hang onto that unit for twenty turns, you learn its technology and can reproduce the units yourself. In an auto-play game today, this happened - the NPC's were stealing each other's units. Claude summarized the action thus:

Salvage (the bribery/theft of a unit) fired 7 times and the reverse-engineering arc completed twice: Barbarians held a captured Diplomat 20 turns and learned Writing (turn 333), then a Caravan for Trade (turn 502). Exactly the 20-turn mechanic working end to end, and pleasingly it's the barbarians teaching themselves to write.

Yes, the game play pleased the LLM that I've been using to vibe-code the game, and it was praising a simulated civilization in the process.