[Spoilers] Honest Cyneheard inherits the purple.

[Cyneheard]

Awesome, I'll look at that in a second.

Settling in place, I ran a worker --> warrior (size 4!) --> worker --> settler plan (Note: the worker is a little idle b/c he can't improve ANYTHING when there's so many forests around; the one worker I started with built 2 roads before BW came in)
EOT40:
Settler has had 2 turns to move, including an extra tile thanks to those roads I was able to put down
53/60 on a 2nd worker (or 53/100 on a 2nd settler)
Revolted to Slavery
4 of the forests are chopped
Size 4, 0f in the box
65/128 Pottery beakers, Agri, Mining and BW all researched.

For the PHF settlement, I'm desert-ing the tiles I can't see; this will be a true worst-case scenario. About to run that one.

[Cyneheard]

Re: the first plan: the 2nd worker finished in the non-PH plan around the time BW came in, so it seemed a little faster.

The PH plan has me go Worker --> Warrior --> Warrior to 14/15 (could've done Barracks here, I guess) --> Settler (finishes EOT34, revolt T35 to Slavery) --> Worker
On T40:
I've got a bunch of extra City #2 turns that I don't sim
66/128 on Pottery instead of 68/128 (I improve the Plains Tile we're starting on as a forest, so it's a 2/1/1 tile)
Only 2 forests chopped
48/60 on Worker #2 (Note: Could whip this one for 1 pop. Couldn't have done that with the other start, as I'd just revolted and added two chops that turn)
Size 4, 0f in the box.

So this comes out ahead WITHOUT any other tiles visible. Um, yeah, moving to the PH pays for itself pretty quickly. And the micro with this start is REALLY easy from a WB perspective; there just aren't that many choices to make yet. Also, the early farm for a 2/1/1 tile pays back much of the beaker cost. So that means I move the warrior either 1 or 7 on T0, verify I don't need to move west, and then move onto the PHF to settle T1.

[Cyneheard]

Great Merchant, what matters:

Currency
Metal Casting
Code of Laws
Mining
The Wheel
Alphabet
Pottery
Sailing
Paper
Monarchy
Civil Service
Guilds

Hm, that's interesting. I can block Paper by not researching Lit (thanks Krill), but a GM bulb of Guilds itself is kinda PITA now. Since with this start I can't afford to skip Math, I'd have to get everything through Civil Service as well as the usual Guilds pre-reqs. So a GM bulb isn't terribly viable. Paper and Guilds are about as difficult to bulb, as I'd want Monarchy beforehand either way, and

Note: On Monarch/Large/RBMod, Education is 4508 beakers. Um, the Lib race is going to come down to who can get 2 GSci to bulb that tech. Maybe that's the plan I follow instead: Spit out 3 GSci (One Academy, 2 for bulbing Edu).

Scientist:

Writing
Mathematics
The Wheel
Alphabet
Philosophy
Optics
Paper
Biology
Compass
Aesthetics
Sailing
Calendar
Iron Working
Metal Casting
Agriculture
Masonry
Bronze Working
Machinery

Bulbing Machinery is rather difficult. Philo can be blocked (skip Meditation), and Paper can as well (Skip Lit). But that still means getting Compass and Calendar and IW. Not really worth it.

Other Great People are really hard to generate for a lightbulbing strategy; I'm not chasing Henge (I don't see how I could possibly beat Biz of Ethiopia: his worker is a 12t or 10t build depending on his plant, and he gets +50% hammers into Henge, AND he gets his UB that way). You don't go for 'Mids because it lets you lightbulb something. You go for Mids because it makes sense for your civ and is cheap enough.

Now, if I went Oracle --> Metal Casting, I might go Forge --> Pray The Engineer Beats The Oracle. But I'm not even sure I want to chase the Oracle; Metal Casting isn't that strong, and while I could grab Monarchy, it isn't an essential tech to me either. Oracle --> COL might be OK as I'd be going Math --> CS. But I think I need to focus more on regular expansion than the Oracle; my one Oracle game had several advantages (Exp, War Chariots, Better Start, Obelisks for great bulbing) that I lack this time around. And I still lost that game by under-expanding.

[Cyneheard]

Oh, and Lib is ALSO 4508 beakers. Bulbing and a fast Oxford are so critical, I think.

So rough game plan:
T0: Move warrior 4, make sure I'm not missing anything terribly important (a furs would tempt me to SIP, but I think I still move to the PH, a deer means I SIP, but if there's nothing else on the forests, then it's to the PH)
T1: Presumably settle on PH.
Figure out my real start over T1/T2 once I can see my BFC.

Likely tech plan:
Agri --> Mining --> BW
Pick up Hunting and/or AH if needed for City #2
Pottery --> Writing --> Math. Once Writing's in, I get a quick Library in the capital and run 2 scientists, likely growing towards the happy cap off of the 2 corns. That scientist becomes an academy in the capital. I then have some options:
Lit for GLib (which would also solve any bulbing problems I may have)
Drama/Music are an option if I go up that route as well; more happy never hurts, and a free GA hath its advantages
Guilds/Banking for Cataphracts, Banks, and Mercantilism
Education for Oxford and being able to get Lib

I probably have to go for GLib if I get marble and am secure. 16 GSci points a turn when I need 500 for GScis #2 and 3 is too much to ignore.

[Ilios]

If you keep this up, I'll follow you exclusively.

[Cyneheard]

If you keep this up, I'll follow you exclusively.

A bribe! A bribe!

Hey, it may actually work...

Ok, let's continue with the T0 thoughts, this time about RBMod:

The Changelog.

Traits and Civs, insofar as they effect this game, have been covered. Note: I forgot to mention that the Vulture is a tiny bit superior (+30% vs. Melee) so that it actually gets equivalent odds against Axes (i.e., a similarly promoted Vulture and Axe on flat land should get 50-50 odds in almost all cases; IIRC there was one pair of counterexamples where if it was Vulture vs. Axe the attacker had odds no matter which one was attacking).

CIVICS. This is important.

Police State: Now Medium Cost (down from High).
Vassalage: Now provides free support for military units as well (meaning Pacifism is cheaper), and is Medium Upkeep.
Slavery: 30h for the 1st pop, 20h for the 2nd pop and subsequent pops. So, 30/50/70/90. On Quick speed, that's 20/33/46/60.
Serfdom: +75% Worker Speed, +1h for Watermills and Windmills.
Free Market: No longer provides -25% Corporate Costs. Now provides +25% Trade Route Yield.
Environmentalism: No longer provides +25% Corporate Costs, or +2 commerce to windmills. Provides +1 gold per specialist, +1c to farms and pastures, +2c to forest preserves, and Low upkeep. Swapped with Free Speech. Now available at Liberalism.
Free Speech: Now High Upkeep, swapped with Environmentalism. Now available at Scientific Method.

The easy changes:
Police State and Vassalage got buffs. Also, Vassalage + Pacifism was made stronger to make Pacifism a more reasonable niche option in MP play (as high military is the norm).
Because we removed Corporations, Free Market needed a boost, especially on non-water maps, and +25% Trade Route Yield is perfect for getting 3c TRs from capital connection + 50t of peace.

Will those three changes affect my game? Let's see:
Vassalage + Pacifism becomes a lot stronger during a Golden Age for temporary production. As I'm likely going to be at Banking long before I get to Econ, I doubt I'm going to be running FM.
Police State is much better at being a WW-blocker, but I won't know if I need it until I end up needing it.

The big changes:
Serfdom is meant to be playable in Ancient Age starts. If I roll with Serfdom, then I'm spamming Windmills over my mines (+1/1/1 beats +0/2/0 any day) and watermills to replace my farms (+0/3/0 crushes +1/0/0, and the watermills only get better later). Works with State Property just fine, especially if you also have a lot of US towns late-game.

Environmentalism:
It's a rather different civic now. Krill & I wanted to make a specialist economy play a little stronger, and considering just how many other tiles are getting civic boosts, +1c to farms (which no longer triggers Financial, even on rivers!) and +1g to specs is nice support to a Rep/Merc play (the +1c to pastures and +2c for forest preserves were mostly flavor, although they obviously help a little bit).
A specialist economy can actually live off this and Rep (can't forget the tech swap!), although there's the old standbys of Bureau, Vassalage and Nationhood sitting there in the Legal column. This really does tempt me to chase the 'Mids and go with an all-out specialist economy, but I won't consider that until I get stone.

Free Speech:
This is an Econ civic now, it shows up at Sci Meth instead of Lib, and it's High Upkeep. Still doesn't change the fact that it's amazing, but there's the tension between it and State Property now. How will I determine which way to go?
Easy:
How much of my econ is a cottage econ? If pretty much all of it, then FS. If I'm running lots of mills and specs and all that instead of towns, then State (esp. since I wouldn't be in US).

Oh, and the elephant in the room, Slavery, deserves its own post.

[Cyneheard]

Slavery. The centerpiece to RBMod.

In BtS, every pop point --> 30h, and you got an unhappiness penalty for clicking on the whip button. So large whips and max overflow were encouraged.

Here, though, it's every pop point --> 20h, and you get +10h in exchange for taking the unhappiness hit. So instead of 30/60/90/120, you get 30/50/70/90h. Whips are functionally limited to 1 or 2 pop now in most cases (and I'd be very reluctant to 2-pop whip a worker, for instance, although a 2-pop settler, especially a 2-pop Imp settler, is still strong).

So how does this affect play?
1) Whip Every City Every 10t. Or close to it. Being Cha, I have a little more flexibility in when I apply the whip, which is nice. Especially since we've made the happy/hammer tradeoff explicit, and I will likely have surplus happy to trade in. But this is very important: the # of whips matters a lot more now, so I need to optimize that when able.
2) Whipping with minimal overflow for 1 pop is ideal now.
a) Therefore, I basically want chops to come in the turn I start a worker/settler, and then whip the worker/settler to completion for 1 or possibly 2pop.
b) Other sources of production (mines, chops, food overflow from workers/settlers) are now somewhat stronger early game. And guess which of those resources I have in abundance?
3) The start is slower. Pre-granary, a 2-pop whip is barely a 1:1 food-hammer conversion.

Also, it means that I've got a much stronger incentive to transition out of slavery. Slavery used to work beautifully for things like 4-pop whipping a market and the like, but those days are gone (intentionally; that was what we wanted to stamp out more than anything, was slavery being the primary source of production for a very long time). So I expect I'll want to transition to Caste or Serfdom eventually, but the decision there is mostly based on 'Mids.


Now, I think one other player's situation is unique enough that it deserves some discussion:
Krill. Specifically, since he got the civ that received the largest indirect buff in RBMod.
So, for him, he wants to whip every FIVE turns post-COL instead of every 10. Oh, and he's Spiritual. So every five turns, he switches either to slavery and whips everywhere, or whips and then switches from slavery, and gets the full benefit of slavery while getting half the benefits of either Caste or Serfdom.
And if you're whipping every 5t, you're basically whipping 1 pop 90% of the time, so he's almost unaffected by the slavery nerf.
And were he overeager to whip like a madman (hey, it's Krill), he's Cha, so he can.

Why did KRILL have to be the person to get this combo? Fortunately, it'll be a while for him to get to COL, but he may do an Oracle play or something.

[Cyneheard]

A quick one and a somewhat-brief one (Wonders and Base Units):

Wonders:

Rushmore: Now -50% WW (from -25%).
Red Cross: 200h.
West Point: 550h, +5XP. Now requires a lvl 5 unit (17XP/13XP for Charismatic).
Great Lighthouse: Now +1 trade route instead of +2 trade routes, enabled at Masonry, but needs lighthouse and Sailing (no functional change in the tech requirements but makes F6 look less cluttered).
SoZ: no WW effect. Now +3XP, 200 hammers, no building prerequisites.
Cristo: +200% SPI production, -50% Anarchy instead of -100%.
The Internet: now a wonder. 2k cost, +15% beakers in every city. No longer a project
SDI: No longer intercepts nukes (irrelevant as nukes no longer).

GLight: Ignoring, I suspect.
SoZ: It's a tempting building, especially for a future HE city. If I get it, yay. If I don't, whatever. But it's a nice bonus if I chase GLib and knock it out as well. And SoZ + Stables + Barracks = 3 promo Cataphracts.


Base unit changes:

War Elephants: now 7 str, +50% vs. Mounted units, and +25% vs. Knights.
SAM Infantry: 75% interception chance (up form 40%)
Mobile SAM: 80% interception chance (up from 50%). No longer requires Oil.
Destroyer: now enabled at Artillery (not Combustion) (requires Oil OR Uranium)
Transport: now enabled at Artillery (not Combustion) (requires Oil OR Uranium)
Mobile Artillery: can now load guided Missiles and Tac Nukes (as Submarines and Missile Cruisers do). No longer require oil.
Gunships decreased to 3 moves.
Scouts: Enabled at Animal Husbandry, NOT Hunting.

Flanking now does 50% damage.

And all the sundry ICBM/Tactical Nuke/Guided Missile changes.

Only three of these matter for right now; everything else is so late that I'm not gameplanning around them:
Scouts
War Elephants
Flanking nerfed by 50% damage

Since huts are on, scouts are decent, but AH just isn't worth chasing this early, so I doubt I'll build any scouts. War Elephants are Knight-shredders, and will do a number on Cataphracts as well. And Ivory is going to exist. So I can't say I'm thrilled about their reemergence as a unit in this game. Oh, and losing 50% flanking damage means that I'm less able to flank off catapults.

Why didn't I think about these nerfs with RBMod BEFORE starting an RB game as Byz? :neenernee

[Cyneheard]

Buildings:

Jails: now -50% War Weariness.
Castles (and replacement UB): no longer decrease bombardment rate of catapults or trebuchets.
Barracks: increased cost to 60 hammers, +1 culture.

The Barracks change doesn't help me any, but it only really helps Tokugawa and Shaka. Basically those two are getting a Buy-1-get-1-free deal when they buy a "Monument" and get a Barracks on the side. Jails have been discussed. If I get the ability to plop a stack of catapults/trebs next to a castled foe, then I might be able to bomb down those cultural/castle defenses before sending in the Judean People's Front Crack Suicide Squad (also known as catapults) into their doom.

Technology:

Hunting: enables pastures, cost increased by 50% from 40 to 60. No longer enables camps.
Animal Husbandry: enables camps, and scouts. No longer enables pastures.
Archery: base tech cost decreased by two thirds, from 60 to 40

Much harder to skip hunting now, and Hunting is no longer a bad starting tech. When do I get Hunting and AH? When I need to. When do I need to? Well, that's a little different than it used to be. But nothing massively different. Archery's cheaper b/c Hunting is more expensive; I doubt we'll see an Archer choke by anybody, but a Hunting start does have that option now.

Espionage:

Switch Civic and Switch Religion now require Future Tech.
Spies now spawn with "Secretive", and cannot see tiles except the one they're standing on.

Switch Civic and Religion were removed because they're always banned and are broken in MP. No big loss; that level of being able to screw with one's opponent wasn't a good thing. Secretive spies do two things:
1) They're useless at scouting and as sentries (this was intentional)
2) It's somewhat harder to find an opponent's city with a spy now (this was a side effect), but only if you don't have their map or have scouted them earlier. Fortunately, Map Trading is now open really early (WRITING, for crying out loud, as Alphabet needed Open Borders to be a viable tech).

Otherwise, though, the Espionage Economy is intact. But (and there's always a "but" with RBMod) a few things modestly decrease the long-term value of the Espionage Economy:
1) Known Tech Bonus: since this is increased, it's a little cheaper to follow-the-leader conventionally instead of stealing his tech once he completes it.
2) Tech Trading encourages a player to forge his own tech path, whereas an EE explicitly avoids doing this.

Still, that doesn't mean a GSpy bomb early wouldn't be worthwhile to pick up a useful tech path that I chose to delay. Since I'm not playing a civ or leader with any real advantages in an EE, I doubt I'm going to put much effort into getting massive espionage points. Yes, Jails and Courthouses will get built (and if I want an SE but don't have 'Mids, then Constitution becomes a priority).

[Cyneheard]

I knew I was forgetting something important.

Tile Changes.

Watermills: +1 base hammers, no longer receives +1h at Rep Parts.
Workshops: +1 base hammers, no longer receives +1h at Chemistry.
Mines: +1h at Rep Parts.
Whaling Boats: Enabled at Sailing, not Optics. Otherwise unchanged.
Oil Wells: Now requires 3t on Normal speed (instead of 10t).

Whaling Boats requiring Sailing is either convenient or irrelevant. We'll find out which later. The Oil Well change is designed for Pitbosses so that all it takes is 2 workers to repair it if it gets sabotaged.

Watermills are now 0/2/0 without any extra bonuses (Serfdom's available at Feud, and Workshops start at -1/2/0 and become -1/3/0 at Guilds (hey, look at that! A tech I'm already targeting).

Now, in PBEM22, I'm living large off of State Property + Electricity Watermills and Workshops (although Lewwyn's got too far of a lead for me to catch him, grumble grumble me own damn fault for delaying Currency). However, these tile improvements don't work seamlessly together because of the civic choices. Instead, if these were my primary tile improvements and civics post-Guilds/Banking:
Farms and Workshops on Flat.
Mines on hills.
Rep/Enviro (Vassalage prior to that, most likely)/Caste/Merc at first, State later/Probably Theocracy, but could be one of several options, then that's the tile improvements I want and a lot of 6b/1g scientists in cities giving me my tech.

If I don't do that, then I probably stick to a conventional Great Person Farm with everyone else going farms/cottages/mines and I stick to US/Any/Slavery/FS/Any for my civic choices.

I really hope I have stone; Rep lets me get away with no cottages, and I don't think I want to stick with cottages forever. We'll see what happens.


NOTE:
I also need to be wary of the Philosophical Trap while planning. Realistically, a proper 5-6 spec (or more) NE site is going to produce so many more great people than all the other cities, even if they are running heavy specialist economies. So I don't want Phi to lull me into "Have To Run Specs Everywhere", but I do think that RBMod in general gives non-Cottage Econ options, and Guilds/Banking are somewhat key in reaching those options. A Phi player in BtS should probably run a cottage economy if the terrain warrants it, but between Enviro's boost to farms/specs and the conventional whipping-cottages-for-production plan being weakened later, it's not as nearly automatic a decision as it used to be.