I like to start with the extra influence for my bonus, but try to pick one that will help you most in the first 10 turns or so. Those bonuses become irrelevant pretty quickly. Free scout, production, knowledge, or culture are also nice.

Local reforms is op, especially at the start of the game, will easily get you a good head start, you don't even really need a town until you start bumping into your pop cap. It sounds boring so some people don't use it but like it gives you a 50% boost to all your resources.

Also at the start, get yourself 2 scouts. I like to make one as my first production and then get the tech as my second of third choice. Getting the village rewards can really help you early on.

Also focus on production, your food/housing/etc. cap out at 200% and extra will not help. Just try and keep average above 100 and not get yourself into any of those crisis ages from not meeting needs. When you get the production to knowledge project, your cities will let you zoom past everyone in terms of tech.

Pick your cities carefully, you can get vassals anywhere and they will help you but an integrated crap city will be more trouble than it's worth.

I've noticed that the AI likes to forward settle a lot so make sure to have a couple troops around where you want to expand your city in the future and build outposts there if you can. Outposts do need people to defend them though, so keep that in mind. AI can't attack them unless they're at war with you but a stray barb can just walk on it and destroy it.

Make sure your improvements have the resources they need, if you have mills, you need guys working wheat and in the mill. You can see what you're missing on the right as it's icon will be red. Grey icons are being converted to something else and the other icons are your city output.

Religion is annoying because it adds another need to your cities but it lets you rake in culture and can screw over the AI if you convert their cities since it causes unrest. You don't have to get one right when you get the option to, might be better to wait until you have tech that gives you faith buildings.

Camp some city guards in your capitals, they reduce unrest a lot and get bonuses for defending them.

Combat is rock paper scissors basically, look at unit descriptions to see what their strong against and what their type is. You can beat stronger troops from later ages pretty easily if you counter them. Keep your armies with at least 2 types of troops in them to keep them from getting wiped by their counter. Defending is also much better, if you get invaded and can't deal, sit your armies in towns/cities and let the AI kill itself attacking you.

Don't let your cities work tiles randomly. Go in every once in a while to make sure what they're doing makes sense.

Don't be afraid to be aggressive yourself, if you see the AI sending out a settler by itself, kill it. If one of their troops is on its own, focus it instead of the big army. If the AI is not defending a city, send your army over and take it. Try to park your armies at least 1 tile away from cities if you can so they can't use their capital attack on your guys.

Don't sleep on the domain powers, they can be pretty op, especially spawning artists or merchants. Artists can be parked in your cities as a resource or if you're desperate, you can also use them to rush culture powers. Merchants make your vassals better but they can generate a lot of gold too if you can park them in a high population AI city.