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C2C Gameplay Chapter 0: 200,000 Years Will Give You Such a Crick In The Neck
Fortunately, game setup is mostly the same as it always was in Civ 4, though I'll need to explain the plethora of new options as they become relevant.
First and foremost, we will be playing on a pre-built map that I downloaded from the C2C forum rather than generating one ourselves. This is because the current version of the game (I'm playing on SVN version 10411 which is the most recent build as of this writing) does not have any map scripts that generate space terrain, and this will be a Big Deal down the line when we start finally getting to the "Cosmos" portion of the game. The map we're using has (I think) a continents map as its Earth landmass, and I will be playing it blind.
This game will be played on Emperor difficulty on Marathon speed, as that's evidently the speed this is balanced for. Don't worry too much about the other options for now, just know that tech trading isn't a thing in this mod and neither are vassals. The important part is the victory condition. Since the intent of this LP is to try and get through an entire game from beginning to Future Tech, I'm going to enable Mastery Victory, which is a scoring victory comprising a bunch of different criteria that each civ is judged on when all turns have been played. The important part is that Mastery overrides all other victory conditions whether they're selected or not. I doubt I'll get as far as running out the turn limit, so we'll just use the Mastery Victory score as a benchmark to see how well the game is going.
As for civ and leader? Well, the truth is that it doesn't really matter that much, especially with my settings. I'm using an option called Developing Traits, which is a feature that allows players to select a Trait at certain intervals during the game based on how much total culture you generate. Combined with Start Without Positive Traits, which I also turned on, it means that all players start the game completely Traitless and build their leader's unique abilities as they play. I quite like this system, unbalanced though it may be, and it simplifies the leader selection process, which is welcome, so I'm going with that.
As for civs? Well, this one is just a bit more complicated and ties into a new system that I'll probably use a seperate update post for. The short version is that civs have absolutely no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever except for one specific building that will serve as the foundation for diversifying our entire empire. Stuff like unique buildings and unique units will be entirely dependant on what type of land we get, so there's no way to know in advance what the best options will be. For simplicity's sake, I'm just going to go with a random leader/civ combo and see what happens.
We get Suppiluliuma I of the Hittite Empire who is, uh, a guy I guess.
And here's our start. Coastal starts are good in C2C if I remember correctly but, as you might notice, there are no resources around us. At all. Well, it turns out we don't actually know of any resources at all! Everything is just a big old pile of dirt to us primitive folk. We'll discover exactly what we have in our land as we research the appropriate techs. Oh and it's not shown in this specific screenshot but the max turn count for this game is 8000 turns. Yeah, this is not a short game. 
When we settle we're given a free Tribal Guardian, a 2 strength garrison unit that cannot move but will provide sufficient protection against any wandering barbarians that may come our way. Settling also immediately gives us a couple automatic buildings in our capital with various effects. Get used to this, as these "Special" buildings, as they're called, will be the bane of our existence for the entire game.
The important one for now is this one, Culture (Middle Eastern), an automatic building corresponding to the region our chosen civ originated from and to my knowledge the only thing in the entire game that our initial Civ choice affects. The idea is that depending on the terrain of our cities we can build various "cultures" throughout our empire corresponding to nations and empires in history that, when built, give us access to various unique goodies specific to that culture. It's essentially a more organic form of unique units/buildings/etc. The wrinkles are that all the culture buildings have prerequisites beyond terrain (in this case for the time being we can only develop cultures that in real life developed in the Middle East) and that cultures count as World Wonders, so only one player in the game ever has access to each one at a time. I'll explore the Culture building mechanic in more detail when it becomes relevant.
You may have also noticed that we, uh, kind of can't grow. Our city starts with a ton of unhealthiness and not even fresh waters and forests can overcome this enough to gain any food to grow. Where is this crazy amount of unhealthiness coming from?
Here is the new Civics screen. Yes, this is just as stupidly complex and needlessly fiddly as it appears. Far from the simple 5x5 configuration of BTS, there are a total of fifteen Civic categories, each of which allows us to select one of 10-15 options throughout the game. Civics here aren't just small but impactful bonuses that steer the course of our empire, they are one of the primary gateways we need to be able to actually do anything at all. They even provide access to powerful unique buildings that only function when their corresponding civic(s) are active. To start, we have several civics that provide unhealthiness, a malus to science, hammers and gold, a huge malus to growth in general, and a bunch of other unsavory albatrosses that make our feeble primitive minds incapable of little more than standing around and picking our noses. A huge part, nay, the primary goal of the early game is digging ourselves out of this hole in the ground so that we can grow and expand like any proper Civ empire should.
For posterity, here's a listing of all of our current civics and their effects. You can also have some fun speculating what some of the late-game Civics could possibly be like if you dare.
You'll notice a couple of odd icons in the Garbage and Immigration civics that you won't have seen before. I'll get to those. Oh will I get to those, don't you worry.
(The starting gold seems to be a quirk of the map scenario, I'm just gonna roll with it)
Fortunately the other info screens are about what you'd expect, some with enhancements to suit the needs of the mod. I should also mention if you're unaware that the BUG mod, a mod that adds several quality-of-life features and improvements to the base game, is fully integrated into C2C much as it is with almost every other mod out there, and that includes a bevy of customizable options cosmetic or otherwise. I'm not gonna mess too much with it both cause there's a lot of options and because I want to spare you all the headache of looking at them. If you happen to notice minor variations in the UI as this LP progresses for whatever reason, it's probably because I messed with a BUG setting to make life easier on me.
We have two units and two buildings accesible to use. I'll get into units in the next update because that's a can of worms in and of itself. Alpha Male and Alpha Female are the initial buildings we start with, and give +1 hammer and +1 food respectively. Growing is impossible right now so I'll take the 1 hammer first before anything else.
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That's all for now. There's a lot to take in and the game hasn't even started yet, but we've got our city down and our production set, so we can finally begin playing the game for real and getting to the nitty-gritty of what makes C2C's Prehistoric era tick. Look forward to it.
...Oh right, our tech selection. Can't ignore that now, can we. We have two possible selections right now so figuring out what we want to do shouldn't be too much of an issu--
Huh, that's a lot of icons. Some units, a lot of promotions, hard to tell what is what.
Oh, um, well. That's a pretty significant list of stuff.
What am I even looking at here?
Wait where is the end of the tech tree anyway--
