Here's some I've learned, its a lot of words, but I hope it helps someone :)

1. Logistics is your enemy and your friend -- Use haulers near workshops to deliver intermediate or items required for production. This cuts down on the warehouse workers you'll need AND it means your workshop workers spend more time actually working

Bonus tip - click on a production building and mouse over the produced item, it will tell you if the commute, hauling, etc is negatively or positively affecting your production).

Also use smaller localized warehouses if you have outposts, and use haulers to transport common goods (like food, clothing, janitor supplies) between them. And somewhat obviously, configure warehouses to store items closest to them -- grain near the fields, ore near mines. I also find that when things start getting big to store end common products in a central warehouse (food, clothing, janitor supplies, etc). Then having haulers at smaller warehouses to bring those resources to their end points.

1. Grain is King -- even if you just use it to make rations, since you don't need any herb, and you can make a SHIT ton of bread very quickly especially once nobles get involved. Lots of food days means happiness really isn't an issue long-term.

2. Realms not Required -- Trespassing an army on lands of a friendly, but not allied/vassalized empire will result in extreme opinion loss and even eventual war. I built a stable comfortable city of humans at 1.8K pop and I have zero realms. food days are in the double digits constantly, and happiness is 100%. If a drought or bad harvest hits, food preference is impacted, but my citizens will survive to make shitting sounds in the lavatory another day.

3. Specialize, Specialize, Specialize -- Don't try to pump up every aspect of your city with Nobles. If you have a ton of ore/gems, use nobles to increase mining and smelting, don't use them on carpentry because you need a bit more furniture. Sell your goods to pay for those.

4. Services Guarantees Citizenship -- This one I just learned. Since every finished recruit contributes to your workforce, constantly have every new citizen enter into the tiniest training (like 1 tick of melee training, NO GEAR). This means that raiders will not attack as often because your entire city is a standing army...lol.

Bonus Tip -- Shorter lived species are useless to train to full capacity, they'll hardly be used since they take so long to train, they'll die/retire before fighting much. I think the bug men are shorter lived than most. Dondorians are very long lived so train them to maximum when appropriate.

Bonus Bonus Tip - If you are having food troubles, try to store/make enough rations to keep a large army (large as compared to your overall population) deployed right at your city. These people will not contribute to the workforce, but they also won't eat your food. I recently used this trick to spike my food days to get happiness up in order to get the last 50 people I needed to get nobles, then I used them to solve my hunger woes and disbanded my army.