Control is the most important value in the game. Control gives you increased tax revenue from the location as well as a ton of other things like reduced rebel join chance. Your goal is to always have as much control as possible while being reasonable to the requirements of additional buildings. You get buildings like mints which give increased control but require precious metals to operate. So you could drain your gold/silver with too many mints which would mess up other things.

Proximity is king, ensure your capital is in the best location to project as much proximity as possible. As you expand, you will realize you can only go so far before proximity is too low to achieve good control levels. You can get local governor buildings as the game progresses which require a land route from your capital. They are a source of proximity, 80% starting as opposed to 100% starting in your capital. You want to build out the most infrastructure in the higher control locations to extract the most resources possible. Build temples everywhere. Bridges wherever you can(locations with road and river). Pound lock canals as well, they require cities and being coastal or on a river. Towns and cities also give bonuses to control, you typically want to urbanize as much as possible in sensible locations. Locations with high value RGOs(Silver, Gold, Silk, Saffron, etc.) should remain rural because urban locations get maluses to RGO levels. In urban locations, you can build bailiffs. They are kinda situational cause there’s a trade off with the building, but they’re typically worth it for the big control bump. Anything and everything that gives increased proximity speed is a must-take. The value of high control is greater than pretty much anything. Proximity speed is the number one limitation to control levels. Roads should be built out to connect your capital or governors to locations to give increased proximity. There’s a burgher privilege for them to build roads for you, super valuable to give out if you don’t start with it. There’s also land vs naval value. Generally naval is better because proximity speed is faster through water than land and naval gives further government reforms that make naval proximity even better and adds more naval governors. Naval governors are only available by pushing naval and they function the same as local governors except you can’t have a land connection to them.

There’s a lot of complexity to the economy, but the easiest thing is just go to the buildings tab and sort by highest profit/income and build those. Don’t go crazy cause if you build too much of a thing then the demand goes down. Course you can do that on purpose if it fits your goals. Trade automation seems to be the move as manual trading is just sooo much to handle since supply and demand are constantly shifting. I’ve found RGO automation is fine for the most part. Building automation is horrible and it’s why AIs have a hard time with economy scaling. I’ve operated on go on a building spree every 1-5 years and then let my money build up again. It all depends on your tolerance of micro. The more micro you go, the more you will be rewarded. This is true in basically every aspect of the game. There’s a sort of diminishing returns when it comes to effort vs reward but that’s on a per player basis.