Once I made the key discovery about the new strength of running "Wealth", my research effort exploded upwards. I'd been stuck around 1300 beakers/turn, alternating between 60% and 70% research as needed, but now I could easily afford 90% research, which soared me up into the 2100/turn range. That's an increase of almost fifty percent, for those of you counting at home. Very noticeable.
I found that Blake's new AI was still generally willing to trade techs with me (at least those with good relations), but they no longer had the gigantic gold surpluses that we're used to seeing the AIs running around with in the late game. Instead of having 1000g sitting around to no effect, it seems they use that money on researching - excellent. Now if the AI can just stop wasting *SO* many resources on espionage to no effect, we'll be in good shape.
While I wasn't able to get a lot from these AIs, a couple of trades sped my path to space:
I was Friendly with both Zara and Willem. The other civs were mostly "Cautious", because I insisted on trading with everyone and piled up a lot of "worst enemy" penalties. Justinian was "Annoyed", which was cause for some concern, so I churned out a lot of infantry and tanks to prevent him from getting any ideas.
I eventually spread Sid's Sushi to all of Pacal's cities, then saved the game for test purposes later. Here's what his finances looked like in debug mode, when I went back and checked it:
Umm... something doesn't look right there. As if we needed more evidence, corporations are badly broken in this version of Beyond the Sword. I did find it pretty funny that Pacal's corporation costs were FOUR TIMES that of all other maintenance costs combined. 
(Then he gets to pay that corporation cost again via inflation - umm, yay?) Note also the high espionage slider (20%) for no purpose I can determine. And so the net effect is that while I'm pumping out more than 2000 beakers/turn, Pacal can barely manage 600. You really can destroy the AIs economically just by spreading your corporations to them.
Just for the record: the AIs really do not play the same game as the human economically. The AIs without corporations generally had total expenses around 100. Justinian, with the game's largest empire, was just over 200. My expenses on the same turn were over 800 (!) I don't begrudge the AI getting a free pass on much of the game's economic engine - it needs it to be competitive - but everyone should be aware that the human truly does not operate under the same rules as the AI.
Justinian was soon at war yet again:
Round Two of the Byzantine/Native American war looked even more destructive than the first. My ancient warrior amused himself by sending back regular dispatches from the front. (I thought it would also be a good idea to keep tabs on the monster Byzantine SOD!)
I completed the Apollo Program in 1875AD and started divying up the spaceship parts. Here's what that looked like:
Taking cities off Wealth slowed my research rate, but there was nothing I could do about it. Can someone tell me why there are even MORE spaceship parts now in Beyond the Sword? 
Frankly, I thought that what we had in non-expansion Civ4 was already pushing it. Having FIVE Thrusters now (and each of them more expensive) doesn't make the game more interesting, just adds needless tedium. Having not one, but TWO Engines is equally stupid. All this is going to do is drag out things to little point, except in the maybe 5% of games that have a genuine space race. Ugh.
I made no effort to build the United Nations, expecting that I wouldn't be able to pull enough votes to win. Willem ultimately completed it, launching the first election:
Hey, not bad! Maybe I'll have enough to win after all. I call for a diplo victory vote, and:
Well, that's what I thought. Close, but no cigar. To win via diplomacy, you usually can't do what I did here, try to play all sides at once. In this sense, going for space and maximizing commerce (via trading with everyone) actually is at odds with striving to win by UN. I like that, although frequently if the player has wiped out one or more AI civs, he or she will have enough population to win the vote via backdoor domination with just one or two allies. I tend to play that way more often than not, because the space win just takes too darn long.
I launched a Golden Age in 1900AD to speed along research and the final couple parts, but we're all pretty familiar with that by now, aren't we? Spaceship finished in 1912AD, then...
SIXTEEN TURNS to victory?! 
WTF kind of crap is this? I can't believe that after launching the spaceship, you now have to sit and wait for it to reach Alpha Centauri. This is, hands down, the WORST addition in Beyond the Sword. Yeah, I know it was like that in the early Civ games - I've been playing since the original Civilization. But the only point that this game element ever served was allowing the player to beat the horribly-designed AI spaceships in a close game. When Firaxis abstracted the spaceship victory in Civ3 to the construction of 10 distinct parts, I thought it was a major step forward. Now we're back to the old way again... and it really feels like a move backwards. Ugh.
Whoever launches the spaceship first should win the game. It's as simple as that. Having to WAIT and click "Next Turn" over and over again is emphatically not fun.
While sitting around doing nothing, waiting for my spaceship to arrive, Sitting Bull became a vassal of Zara Yaqob, who then proceeded to lay into Justinian. There were a lot of units flying around back and forth in the west over there... and Zara obviously had more than just units:
Poor Suryavarman! His capital got nuked! Life for a vassal civ is no picnic, it seems. 
Absolutely nothing of interest happened, and I won the game in 1928:
That seems ridiculously late to be winning the game, although it was of course delayed for 16 turns by the new game mechanic. And the spaceship has more parts now too, and the tech tree more techs to research too, so maybe this result won't be TOO bad. Still, I could have won much faster had I figured out the whole Wealth thing sooner, or if I didn't have so many overseas cities (paying out those outrageous "colonial costs"). Well, I knew I wouldn't be posting a fast finish as soon as I decided at the outset to avoid attacking the AI civs. I expect this will be a thoroughly mediocre finish compared to my Portugese colleagues. Have to try and do better next time then! 
Final Finances screen:
Costs over 1000 (I've never had them anywhere close to that high before, even in Adventure Eleven) and inflation ridiculously out of control. Equivalent costs in non-expansion Civ4 would have been about 411/turn - that's more than SIX HUNDRED gpt less. Wow. And there are still 150 turns to go in this game too. Those who didn't finish until the late 20th century will see inflation rates over 200%!
I don't have too much else to add, so here are some shots from the replay screen. Starting positions:
Early expansion:
Landgrab finished, colonization underway:
Suryavarman goes down:
Final map:
Events really shouldn't appear on the replay screen. Neither should civic swaps, in all honesty. Between events, civic changes, and Great People popping up all over the place, 90% of the info on the replay is now filler material. That's a shame, because I like watching the replays; I feel like I have to sort through the wall of text with a fine comb to figure out what's actually going on.
I actually did enjoy this game. The report probably didn't sound like that, but I did. I'm frustrated by the fact that so many things in Beyond the Sword are improved (especially the AI), while other parts of the game balance were unnecessarily tampered with, to poor effect. Some of this should be fixed in patches, but the space race is just plain bad. I don't ever expect to go for space again, in all honesty. How successful the patch is in fixing some of these problems will go a long way in determining what scenarios we run at RBCiv.
Thanks for reading! Maybe you even learned something. I had to go heavy on the info, because there wasn't a lot of action in this report. 
