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Sure, you need [*]some[/*] units out of your national borders, just not two or three per city

Coinage is a very bad investment. If you don't know what to build, get more workers.

In the city dialog, there's a panel with details of the city output: food, production, trade, science, luxury, gold...

If you disband a ship, the units in it will sink. Maybe they'll try to hop on another ship or the coast first, but not sure.

IIRC the distance is calculated using Manhattan, max(delta x, delta y), but I'm not 100% sure. Might be sqrt(delta x, delta y) as well. The trade routes work automatically, you can see their bonus in the city dialog (it's part of the "trade" number, you can click on it and it will show det...

Trade is where your taxes come from, so it's essential for science, gold and happiness. Once established, trade routes generate, well, some trade every turn, that you can turn into gold, science and so on. Trade routes can be established between cities A and B by building a caravan in city A and sen...

There's a strategy called smallpox where you just build as many cities as you can close to each other. Usually the AIs don't do smallpox, but don't build cities too far apart either in order to maximize land use. You should do the same, because some key factors in the economy (corruption, waste) gro...

If disbanded inside a city, half their shield cost is recycled into the current production. If disbanded in the fields, they're just gone.

Also build markets, banks and stocks. Don't build expensive buildings (like unis, banks and such) in cities that generate little revenue, they won't be useful anyway. And grow your cities beyond size 4… Usually I keep as much sci as possible while keeping a positive gold balance and not too many rio...

Build temples, cathedrals, or as a last resort assign some non-zero lux% in the tax rates. You can buy buildings even if the city is revolting.

Also, don't send too many units outside of your national borders (ships, military…), they increase unhappiness.

The easy AI is simply better than you at managing its nation. You can use settlers to bump the size of your wonder city, caravans to bring goods from other cities… Despite making many mistakes I just beat the AI at it. In general the AIs are "good enough" early on but struggle in the end g...