Trying SE for the first time, several questions

I'm trying SE for the first time and I'm having a couple problems.
To my understanding, you make as many farms as possible, then work those farms and use the remaining citizens as scientists to get your beakers. Then you can lower your research slider to 0 and use that gold for unit maintenance and buying techs from other civs. I also had the impression that I should never make cottages. Idk if this is completely accurate but that's what I was trying to do.


1: When should you start using only scientists? I started once I had 5 cities and a couple had libraries, otherwise researching would be way too slow.

2: What should you do with new cities, both for ones you build or capture? It takes a while for them to get their pop up and build libraries.

3: What buildings should I build? I know libraries and I assume universities+observatories later in the game? What about markets and monasteries?

4: Are you supposed to build zero cottages, or just prioritize them much less? In my game I was barely gaining gold and sometimes even losing gold at 0. It makes me think you'll need cottages anyway for commerce, otherwise your commerce will be so low there's no point in putting slider at 0.


That being said it's going very well since it's only noble, but I feel like I'm not doing it right.

Attaching my save file. Basically I had a huge lead early game after getting stone hedge and oracle. Went to war with roosevelt a couple of times and now I just made peace with peter and am going to rebuild army for another attack. Still defenitely in the lead but I feel like I'm researching so slow; mansa musa has surpassed me on research.



Thanks

 

Why are you playing vanilla Civ4? Play BTS?

Straight SE is pretty much shunned by most players nowadays. Most use what we'd term "hybrid economy". The crux of SE though is getting Pyramids, and really is only truly of merit in an OCC game.

It's fine to try it out..yeah..but I can tell you that your game is not going well. Sure ...it is noble but your tech pace is really bad.

Ditch SE and really learn the basics of playing this game first. And play BTS...

 

SE is a no go without Representation. Anyway, using grassland farms to run scientists is a very suboptimal play. To make use of specialists you need a reasonably good source of food. Usually it is something like double wet corn or pigs or triple/quadruple seafood. Even better, albeit less commonly used, is Sushi. Still, at this stage of the game workshops are usually better than scientists unless the city in question has run out of land tiles or can pop a great person, which greatly increases specialists value.