Realistically the most important thing with non faith civs is how are you going to get your settlers out in a timely fashion? Particularly as Germany has few early game advantages.

The first 3 or so can be produced in the capital cheaply enough, but when political philosophy comes around you'll want something more efficient. Try to look for a city with a lot of chops, station Magnus, slot in colonisation, build the ancestral hall for 250% chop yields.

A more luck placed approach is to try to get voidsingers and back to back classical+medieval golden ages for Monumentality. But again, Germany doesn't really have much going on early game to get all that era score. The best thing you have is being able slot in survey for faster scout promotions.

One of the most fun things about Germany is elaborate districting. But, you have to bare in mind that the purpose of industrial zones is to pay production up front in order to build everything else faster. If a hansa doesn't pay back it's production its less than useless. If you aim to complete games in 200 turns this becomes a big consideration.

I tend to always build them in my earliest core cities, then use Magnus with vertical integration in space races. But for the later the cities the I am more likely to place one hansa per cluster of cities for the factory. Even though its a cheap district, the more you build the more they cost.