The friendly rules do look a lot simpler!
This may clear some things up: there are no city states and no AI.
Old habits from civ3 MP die hard.
The club rules seems okay, as well. Just there’s a bunch of options and I’m not sure I can be bothered, at least not right now, specifying which we’ll follow.
Friendly rules okay? Seems minimal but banning a couple obvious exploits.
Can you clarify what the difference is? I read through that page a couple times and couldn’t find a clear delineation between friendly vs club rules. I thought it was all one ruleset.
From what I can see, these are the only rules under Friendly (while Club has many more possibilities):
Correct. I’ll leave it with you guys.
OK, sounds good. Are we all on board with the friendly rules? And then if somebody bails we can discuss adopting the AI rules at that point. Like @J_Dennis said, you shouldn’t be prevented from finishing a conquest just because the other player rage-quit.
Yeah, it sounds good.
We should use our common sense and also not use exploits.
Hmn, I didn’t set a password and I’m not sure I can add one. So hopefully, um, I can trust the Vikings not to snoop around in my “empire”. Shrug.
PYDT automatically sets a password to every other players’ turn except the current player. You shouldn’t be able to take the next players’ turn.
Ah, that’s cool, didn’t know that! Should be fine then, there’s definitely a password for the next player’s turn.
We are playing without city states. Are we also playing without natural wonders? It kinda looks that way in the options.
No, there are natural wonders.
Ah, i guess i misread. The options probably meant there are no natural wonders in the pool because we play with everyone available.
There aren’t any other deviations from “standard” setup than the ban of city states?
Um, just the no AI players, as mentioned. Otherwise nothing changed.
The early game is painful sometimes. Just watching the countdown of turns until the unit is produced. Not much to do except trying to plan out my cities. All that will probably change as the fog lifts and better options become available.
Anyone else got barb problems?
Planning, huh, that’s a good idea. 
Barb camp sighted; not a problem, yet.
I don’t have barb problems, I have isolation problems. I’ve got a civ with trading bonuses, but I have yet to meet a single other city-state. I got a bonus trader when I researched pottery, and then I got a second trader from a friendly village, so now I’ve got two traders sitting idle in my capital with nowhere to go! 
Um, you won’t find any, because there aren’t any–no AI either.
You’re going to need to find a human. 
You just get a trader I presume and not an extra trade route from the village? That means you probably have the second trader just hanging around anyways for a handful of turns or more until you get to foreign trade.
Come find me, I’m Poland and wants to trade too!
Oh, duh! I did know that, city-states are just so ubiquitous in the game that I still expected to run into one.