Coyote runners are hilariously powerful. 7 base strength in an era when 4 is common and 5 is new and shiny, with two moves over any kind of terrain. I should bring them up in the balance thread, really. And all you need is an American native culture and a city with stone - get Masonry, build the Toltec culture, and you have access to a unit that will literally dominate the game for millennia. Add poison tips for more bang for the buck - they're easy to get, just pay attention when your hunters bring you live snakes.
Here's one thing you shouldn't do in the prehistoric age: Start with infrastructure that gets you cash, then build a bunch of clubmen, upgrade them to spiked clubmen, and go conquer your nearest neighbour to get a new city long before tribalism (or two neighbours for two cities). The reason you shouldn't do it is that you'll then quit the game in the ancient era when you realise you're so far ahead that there won't be any challenge left. (The first time I tried this I thought that revolutions would kill me, but with a capital connection, happiness management, a proper garrison, and no stability-lowering buildings, it's really pretty easy)
Here's something I haven't tried yet but that I'm curious about - is retreat chance capped? Because if it isn't, I'm pretty sure you can found the Troll Rider Corps by putting together Flanking 3 horsemen with a noble. Pillage and ransack anything and reliably slip out when attacked! Well, I think so anyway. I tried to do it with a bandit rider but street crime turned out to be below the standards of my nation's bluebloods.
I'm not sure, but I suspect that very early on, it's mostly best to use your one citizen to work a high-hammer rather than high-food tile, and to only worry about commerce if you have a specific tech you really need to get to. There's so much food-producing infrastructure that the hammer-heavy start should get even with the food-heavy start pretty fast, and then it makes sense to stay on the hammer-heavy because the extra production from a food tile would just go to waste. And as mentioned before, in the time it takes to grow one population point on a food tile you can work a hammer tile to raise an army to go grab yourself another one.
You probably should also save your free gatherer for a stone tool workshop rather than improving a food resource, just to enhance the hammer-heavy strategy. That's not something I've done yet, though, there's always just something so tasty in sight when you get the gathering tech.
Speaking of wasted food, is that mechanism documented anywhere? I don't worry about it too much because the gameplay implication is so straightforward - basically, you can't grow fast, so try to keep your food production consistently reasonably high and grow steadily instead - but it'd be nice to know if there's some way to affect it that I wasn't told about.
Waste to Sea doesn't look like much until you dig into it a bit and find out that the garbage dock removes all unhealth from population, a la BTS's National Park. Granted it's pretty much all downsides beside that, but when I got it, my cities tended to be at ridiculous unhealth levels (on the order of -5 to -10) and have a long way to go till the happy cap - so if you've got a lot of coastal cities (but ones that don't actually use the water tiles since Waste to Sea makes them worthless), that civic can be pretty damn neat.
