Interesting Question! Well, I would personally take these things!

Secrets of Silk Making (For Trade)
Extra People (Settling Boosts)
Larger Fleet (We won't need the Peloponese)
And Secrets of Greek Fire.

extra people?

I usually take everything; The greek fire, books, Silk, and Venetians. I also usually pick the ottomans rather than skanderberg (you get a very good doctrine to use early game)

This does hurt you for the first few years; you even get an event that gives you some terrible debuffs; but soon after one of the neighbouring tribes sends you help and it goes away. Its a rough start, but it lets you steamroll much later into the game. The venetians also help with establishing a good trade economy and fleet early on, which I like (you get the merchant guild earlier).

Its tough, but definetly worth it,

Originally posted by RomanRabbit:

I usually take everything; The greek fire, books, Silk, and Venetians. I also usually pick the ottomans rather than skanderberg (you get a very good doctrine to use early game)

This does hurt you for the first few years; you even get an event that gives you some terrible debuffs; but soon after one of the neighbouring tribes sends you help and it goes away. Its a rough start, but it lets you steamroll much later into the game. The venetians also help with establishing a good trade economy and fleet early on, which I like (you get the merchant guild earlier).

Its tough, but definetly worth it,

the main impact of the collapse is that it slows down your colonisng of the homelands, the settler boost is much lower in the collapse scenerio, so it takes you longer to settle the homelands and delays you snowballing natives and locking shoreline down from europeans.

you do usualy have a nicer long term advantage tho and i kind of agree with taking Orhan instead of Skandeberg despite the development loss from no free albanian provs, orhan will pacify the natives in the homeland region so you can go oppress on your native policy and save manpower since you wont have native revolts for a bit, and the tier one doctrine is nice too if you dont plan on diploannexing any of the natives that get opinion penaltys from taking it.