I'm going to go ahead and skip through the utter basics of the game like how to click and get to some things I've learned while playing.

1) Gems
So I've already restarted once because I got stuck; used my gems on a settlement, bad idea. Those gems are to help you buy the resources you need to unlock mining so you can: get more gems.
About to restart again because mining gems is a bit more involved than I thought. There's a nice strip of them if you uncover it, you'll see the start of it; there's probably over 1000 gems that get mined up. Exciting but there's a way to get so much more. Whenever you click them, keep clicking them all the way up. Rather than getting 1 gem you'll get as many as you can click out of it. So mine them slowly. Looks like they've taken out multi clicking gems; so use what you have wisely. Also the area no longer respawns upon restarting :(

2) Settlemts
I keep seeing questions about placing them? You'll unlock it after a time I forget if it's from getting a high enough population or a card you get from Battle of the Gods. Either way they're rather useful to gather faith both quicker (it gathers quicker than just at Abodes) and so much easier. You'll get 3 that you can place with faith so spread them out a little ways. They'll connect all the houses within an area a little smaller than you screen zoomed out.

3) Population
I noticed this, seems it's already been posted elsewhere as well; there isn't a population limit however the game will only support so many structures. So tear down you're smaller ones and consolidate.

4) Cards
I'd go after expanding your influence so you can grab all the chests and then work on your population before pursuing to far up the Battle of the Gods. There's a balance to it but if you go to far you'll wind up with cards for an era you're not yet in and your resources will go to it instead of a card for your current era.

Final note if you need/want to restart you'll need to delete local content, actually delete the Godus folder out of your steam library manually, and then reinstall. Wish there was an easier way considering this seems to be only a local map.

If any body else has found anything helpful feel free to share. I'm still kind of wondering about the architecture card. I see the pluses. Blue seems to represent what kind of people are living there but I'm still clueless as to the brown and green?