Aegilops/Omelette question

[Charlie Reams]

On the basis that Rex wants to make life difficult and Prune wants to make life easy, can anyone who knows Aegilops and Omelette reasonably well suggest what combination of V/C they should pick?

[Ben Wilson]

Rex should go for as many consonants as humanly possible all the time, that much is a no-brainer. Fitting a word around 4 vowels and a consonant- with only a few exceptions, any consonant- takes much less thought than trying to find an obscure 13-letter optimum.

Prune, on the other hand, should be as balanced as possible. Prune should always pick consonants first in aegilops and never pick two consecutive ones. In omelette, the balance should always be equal or one out either side if there's an odd number of letters.

[Matt Bayfield]

I agree with Ben about Prune but I disagree slightly with Ben about Rex, speaking only for Aegilops. In my opinion:

2-letter combos: VC, CV, CC all roughly equal difficulty. Actually, strike that - for a non-practised player, CC is probably hardest, and CV easiest. Having played so much Aegilops, I'm probably an unusual case as I always pick CC and I'm fairly sure I know 99% of the CC maximums by heart.
3-letter combos: CCC and VVC are probably harder than any other arrangement. CVC is generally easiest.
4-letter combos: CCCC and VVVC are the hardest for me, and something like CVCV or CCVC is generally easiest.

Basically, an important distinction with Aegilops (which isn't applicable to Omelette) is that it can be much harder to find a word when the first letter is a vowel. In perhaps a similar way, it's often easier to solve a crossword clue if you know the first letter, rather than the second letter.

In Omelette, generally, the more consonants, the harder the round.