Was progressing nicely, researching Code of Laws on my way to the Republic slingshot. Popping a goody hut gave me Philosophy early, which resulted in getting Code of Laws "free," forcing me to research Republic
Ouch! Popping Philo from a hut while you're going for the sling is the kind of 'good luck' that really isn't!
But AFAIK, if you pop a free tech from a hut, it will be the cheapest unresearched tech for which you have the prereqs, and Philo is pretty cheap (about a third of CoL?). So despite being the Russians, it might actually have been better to just stop trading techs and/or popping huts between finishing Writing, and finishing CoL.
If you were not far enough ahead that you lost your tech lead researching Republic I think there was a good chance you would have lost the Philosophy race doing CoL first.
Nah, unlikely at Monarch on Continents (maybe on Pangaea, though).
I think it's more likely that having had the slingshot messed up through no fault of his own (apart from continuing to pop huts, anyway!), he had to 50-turn Republic (or close to it), during which time the AI-Civs all went for the cheaper Ancient techs, so ended up with more techs than him — possibly with some of them also just into the Medieval (which is how I read his 'losing the tech-lead').
Should I have instead researched Monarchy & traded for Republic later?
An extra revolution is massive, and Monarchy is not as good as republic, unless you really want the advantages of Monarchy.
I don't think WJ was suggesting that he would
switch to Monarchy, rather that he would research it — instead of Republic — to use as trade-bait.
But if he was going to have to 50-turn Republic, it would likely have taken almost as long to learn Monarchy — which is a less valuable tech, so he would not have been able to swap it for Republic without adding some extra goodies, that he most likely wouldn't have had anyway.
So continuing to go for Republic was almost certainly the right choice. Then — as Scientific Russia — Lit for cheap Libraries, and Currency + Construction to finish off the Ancient Age, then trade Rep+Lit for 1st-tier Medieval techs if possible.
I have never got a "straight-up town", is this not vanilla or have I just not played enough?
In addition to never popping barbs from Huts (which seems to make up ~90% of my non-Expansionist Hut-results at Emperor!), Expansionist Civs seem to get higher probabilities on the 'upper-tier' Hut-results (best to worst, IMO: Techs, Towns, Settlers, Maps, Gold, nothing, [barbs!]) than non-Expansionist, even at Monarch.
Or maybe it's simply because they
don't pop barbs, so all those 'barb-pop slots' are filled with the other possibilities according to their basic probability-spread (which is probably on a similar scale to the above, e.g. 5%: Tech, 10%: Town, 15%: Tech, 20%: Maps, 50%: Gold)?
(Yes, I'm sure the actual GoodyHut-probabilities are listed somewhere in the dusty archives of CivFanatics, but I can't be bothered to look for them!)