I, for one, have apparently learned nothing from posting 900 times and playing through the whole game.
Could you give a bit of a summary of your game?
I wrote a mini-guild in the final spoiler, where I listed of key factors of play this game to a space victory, feel free to ask more when you are still in doubt.
You have already seen what I post in the final spoiler, where I told about the key factors to play the game, which IMO are much more important than micros.
"when do you settle your cities ?"
I answered this question from the beginning of the mini-guild -- As fast as possible. Fully devote your empire on REXing before the space run out, In this game, the GLH and TC make it the most efficient REXing strategy.
I noticed a couple cottages around your capital when did you create them ?
There's a very important issue should be determined before laying down cottages, do you want it? My criteria of whether to lay down cottages depends on whether the city has enough food plus. Generally I want every city has more than 5~6 food plus before working hammer tiles. Capital is an exception where I want it to have more than 6 food plus after working 3~4 hammer tiles. When did I lay down the 1st cottage in this capital? after mining 3 hills. My capital had been constantly at the size between 3 to 5 in early stage since I almost always whip a settler at size 6.
When did you work them ?
After they are available. Over-improve your city is as bad as not having enough worker to improve, the hammers invested on redundant workers can be used on more useful settlers or military units to conquer more cities.
Could you please show us some of the trick behind the sleight of hand ? (maybe in strategy and tipes section ?)
If you want to see more details about playing a game, SGOTM threads are the best place to go. Myself also did some SG games and some demo game in S&T forum, where you can find them through the link of my name. Currently my teammate kossin is doing a showcase of a deity game in S&T forum, he is pretty good at showing some micro tricks.
To keep them from Crying too much, Santa sold them some older techs at a deeply discounted price (to support his research slider). He also sold some surplus resources for 3 
/turn. Santa made one trade, Metal Casting to SPF/Egypt for Alphabet & Meditation.
, which I think was 1S. I liked the fish and other food tiles, but as everyone else I suffered from low production capacity, at least until Slavery (which I had the foresight to get early). The copper was too far for early barb defense, so I went for IW fairly early too. I cired 
when I saw I settled on the iron because those hammers from an iron mine would have been very useful in this hammer-poor/food rich start. So it was a whip-start for me, and I must admit I'm less experienced with that style of play. But recognizing the problem is usually more than half of the solution.
I did a good job of fog-busting, so barbs were not a problem, and IW was just something that slowed me down.
