Once you've read the rest of this guide, you're going to have an extremely good sense of what everything does. You've researched buildings, wonders, Technology, units, concepts, and pretty much anything that can come up during play. So what's left to talk about?

The answer is thinking about major strategies and tricks that bring these ideas together. Don't focus on individual elements of the game and hope that they lead you toward victory. Instead, plan to use as many combined ideas as possible to give your nation many advantages. The more goodies you get, the better your chance for winning the game. It's time to pull it all together!

Worker Development

This is a tried and true aspect of Civilization, but it bears repeating: use your workers! Cities that aren't developed have a huge power gap compared with cities that are surrounded by a number of improved tiles. Even the weaker early-game improvements add at least one resource point for every tile that gets improved and worked. That adds up to quite a few points per turn of various goodies even by the midgame, and if you hold on to your cities, you're going to have potentially a couple hundred more turns getting those resources.

Don't wait long before getting a worker going. As general pacing, try to have your capital get an improved tile for every point of population it has (at least until you start getting so large that specialists are available and viable).

Also, make sure that almost all of your cities get their own worker. Those workers don't have to be stationed near the city at all times. There are often periods where one city is developed well enough and another needs more help. It's fine to shift around your work force, in the same way that it's smart to shift around your military to bolster areas that are under attack.

Have your workers construct roads over to outposts before they even become cities. You want city connections to start yielding Energy as soon as possible. This really helps to keep your nation profitable.

Also, try not to wait until a city has three or four residents before improving their tiles. Either buy a worker at that location, or build a worker at a larger city and send him or her over as the outpost is grabbing territory. Do not train workers at your new city! This is a major waste of the city's early Production time. Workers need to work on buildings to improve their Growth and Industry. You should train units elsewhere, at a location with high Production, and send things over to the fledging city. This is true for garrison units, workers, and trade units, as well!

You don't even need to wait for an outpost to become a city to start working its tiles. As soon as the territory expands, your workers can get started. That new city might begin its life with one or two improved tiles all ready to go. Quite nice!