1) How do you send luxuries to the various families to keep them happy?
If you click on the family in the tab, you'll have a management menu on the bottom left. There, there is a "manage luxuries" button. Click on it, and you can send luxuries to that family (will stay active until you explicitly take it back or lose the resource). You can also stop sending resource to that family if you feel it would be better used somewhere else.
You can send resources to Foreign nations, tribes, religious clergy and cities in much the same way.
2) What does the purple face icon with devil horns mean?
I don't know what you're referring to atm, although it's probably just a brain failure on my part. Will answer if/when I get what you're thinking about.
3) Is having a city as the family seat of a sage family the only way to found a national religion?
You're thinking Clerics, not sage, but no.
The "normal way" to found a religion is to get an event. If you are the first nation to fit the event prerequisite, you will found the religion next turn. You need two ranchers (pasture specialists) to found judaism, or two accolytes (shrine specialists) to found zoroastrianism. Later religions, (Christiansim and Manichesims) have higher requirement and in particular need a certain number of cities to have earlier religions in the world and in the founding civ, and also have prerequisite techs (metaphysics and monasticism, not sure which for which from the top of my head). If you check in the game encyclopedia you will find the vent prerequisites are explained there.
Founding a Cleric family seat (available for Egypt, Assyria and Persia) is a sort of "shortcut" that guarantees founding one of these, which will make them ineligible for the events above (can only have one zoroastriansim).
Religions can also be founded through events. Sometime the game will offer the possibility to found a religion when you get a cultural event (e.g. A city passing the 100 culture mark), or a characters gone exploring might found a religion on his return.
4) What does Wisdom, Charisma and Discipline actually do?
On your leader, Leader spouse, first four heir and courtiers, stats provide you with yields (or yield penalties if negative).
Wisdom generates science, Charisma generates civics, Courage generates training and Discipline generates money.
On governors assigned to a city, stats *also* provide a multiplier that is applied to the city yield, on the same yields (wisdom/science, Charisma/civics, etc...)
On generals assigned to a unit, stats have different effects. Wisdom increases your chance to get a critical hit when attacking (critical hit = double damage), Charisma increases the unit defence (reduces the damage it takes when attacked), Courage increases its attack (the damage it inflicts when attacking) and discipline gives the unit passive XP each turn.
5) Does gaining/losing legitimacy do anything other than affect your total available orders?
Well, the order generation is a strong effect, but legitimacy other main impact is opinion. your leader legitimacy acts as a straight opinion bonus for your ruling families : 80 legitimacy = +80 opinion for all families. That's why you usually get a good opinion hit when you get a new ruler. Although part of their predecessors legitimacy stays (I believe 50% becomes permanent, your dynasty legitimacy if you will), the new ruler will have to establish its legitimacy to get full political power (orders) and respect (noble families opinion and support)
6) I know the Old World wiki page has an image of the tech tree, but is there a more detailed one online somewhere (i'm thinking like the paper ones that used to come with older versions of Civ).
The wikis are in a desolate state, we'll work on it but it will take some time before you get some good guides and accurate references there. I'll post on the discord and here when I get anything published. Writing guides takes a lot of time tho, which is why most of the guides/tutorials are more in video/stream format yet.
I (over)explain a lot of mechanics while slowly playing a random game in my latest stream if you're interested (
here). We jump around to some other games to explain specific things (naval movement at one point). I know many of us forum users prefer text, but that's not available yet.
The game encyclopedia will be enriched with topic oriented tutorials and explanations shortly, I don't know the release date but I expect in the next week or the one after (some screens/texts were shared in the discord)
