I picked up both the base game and the Rise & Fall expansion the other day and I'm getting demolished. I haven't played a Civ game since 4, so I don't remember much about general strategy (and the few things I do remember are probably completely counterproductive in this game).

I looked up beginner guides for Rise & Fall, but most of them (understandably) focus on the new systems added in this expansion rather than big picture best practices. There are a lot of big picture guides for the base game written in 2016 and 2017, but it seems like R&F has changed enough core mechanics that "the fundamentals" described in the guides might not be so fundamental any more.

Or am I just overthinking this (as I often do)?

I haven't bought Rise & Fall so apologies for the not as useful input but just going off what I've seen of the expansion and the new mechanics, guides on stuff like city district planning should probably still apply but on a more general scale R&F appears to somewhat nerf wide civs(founding a lot of cities, generally smaller in population) with the introduction of the loyalty stuff. In my opinion the base game was heavily in favour of going wide so this probably brings it back somewhat in balance with tall civs(fewer cities, focusing on making them big in population). As I said, haven't actually played the expansion so that's just my theory from seeing what's been shown.

What I mean to say, I guess, is that if you haven't played since Civ 4 then those beginner guides will probably still have a lot of useful information. The Great and Dark ages might change your building priorities somewhat but those are things that (ideally) change from game to game anyway.

They would probably give you some guidance but depending on the Civ you play and how you choose to focus there could be some issues with pre-R&F advice. Specifically relating to how the new Loyalty system works and placing cities.

Other than where to place expansion cities you could probably look up general guides though.

@bbalpert: I would focus on general guides for Civ 6 if trying to get into the game for the first time. Those are going to give you details on how to achieve the various victory conditions and how a lot of the mechanics of the game work e.g. districts, amenities, culture, science.

Rise and Fall added a lot of stuff so you might want to think about just disabling that content while learning how the base game works. Once you're comfortable with the basics think about turning that stuff back on. Also don't feel bad about playing on lower difficulties, that will give you some nice bonuses over the ai that could be handy while learning the ropes.

Cool, thanks everybody!