I just started playing around with it, and haven't played very far into it, but....
Research doesn't seem to be worth it to me. An awful lot of beakers for minimally better units. So I just turned it off. I bought a bunch of workers on the first turn and quickly terraformed into watermill/workshop mode with the appropriate civics, and built hydro plant-levee-health buildings, until I maxed out around size 16, then switched to settlers. Note that settlers take a lot of hammers to build, but newly founded cities start at size 4 with a good set of buildings in place, so it's actually a good deal to fill open land. And with all the starting techs and workers so cheap, you can quite quickly have a powerhouse. I think the overall plan is to emphasize growth/production until the open land is gone, then put together a massive stack and smash rebel cities one by one, then turn against your actual neighbors once you're large.
I also noticed that cottages mature faster (7 turns to hamlet, 4 with Emancipation), so it might be possible to run a cottage economy. The buy rate is pretty good, 1 gold ~ 0.6 hammers, so towns are strong tiles. Haven't tried that yet....
peace,
lilnev
