Something that helped me a ton at the start was to give the burgages greaaaat big backyards to farm carrots.

It seems to me the play is to build your burgages slowly, maxing them out before building another. I had a much better pop growth curve this way instead of building many burgages with the intent to upgrade later.

I forget exactly what triggers it, but on the default middle setting (domination i think?) you get some free spears and shields pretty early on which allows you to make 17 spearmen that are enough to take out the early game baddies,

Seems like after you build your first storage area it triggers, dumping them directly into the new storage area's stock.

I lost a huge amount of wheat before I realized that stuff despawns if it isn't harvested/stored by october 1st.

Yeah, there is a tooltip that says something about November that maybe I didn't read fully; lead to a rough winter thinking I had an extra month for that grain.