I saw 
I've been watching this game from a distance for quite some time and never quite wanted to jump in because there is no free way to try it. This brings me to my first lesson:
It's very, very cheap to get started.
I realized I had accumulated a bunch of Hive Engine coins from various places that I had no idea what they even were for or from. So I converted a few DEC from my Splinterlands account and .20 here and .20 there of WIT, CCC, spare Hive, POB and so on.
Before I knew it, I had quite a bit of SIM to start and I didn't feel like I had put in any money at all.
It looks like it takes 4 Hive for 1 card, but this isn't true at all and that's what scared me off. If you go to the SIM prices in the market, you can get dozens of cards for that price.
Lesson 2:
Read through some guides for cheap city ideas.
I read through some guides and copied a city built for creativity to start from this one.
...Except that I made some changes. And then I got really confused why it wasn't working like I thought it should.
I think this is the ideal way to start. Try to make a variant on a city in a guide and then by figuring out why certain things are different, you'll learn a ton.
Once I had this starting point, I could go into the Info tab and read about things.
NOTE: You don't have to understand what you're reading in these guides before starting. I jumped in and figured it out as I went. Only when I returned to the guides after playing around did I finally see what they were trying to say.
Lesson 3:
There are key numbers to know.
As I read about things, I kept getting buildings and population for my city. When I ran out of SIM, I realized the city wasn't functional.
It could produce people, but it wasn't going to produce technology or background/animation (and I had an income of 1 SIM per day). Yikes! The whole point of creativity was to produce backgrounds.
That was when I realized that there are key numbers you must hit:
Education: 40
Creativity: 80
Education increases the chance of discovering technology, but until you hit 40 with a Research Center, your probability is 0.
Creativity increases the chance of discovering backgrounds/animations, but until you hit 80 with an Art Gallery, your probability is 0.
I was at 35 education and 60 creativity. It was basically the worst thing I could have done from an efficiency standpoint. (I've since fixed this).
Lesson 4:
Use the simulation tool.
I had made a vital mistake. I tried guessing and then correcting, which is quite costly because you'll need to keep buying cards that may not be getting you the result you want.
There's a simulation tool that I had completely overlooked! It lets you see exactly how buying certain cards will affect the stats of your city. Using this prevented me from jumping in on some cards that actually would have been worthless.
Lesson 5:
Use Discord
There's not much to say about this. The Discord people were super nice and directed me to some resources. But most importantly, if you link your Hive to it, you can buy cards directly from a Discord bot and get refunded a percentage of the cost.
It's not much, but when you're getting started, that can add up to 2 or more full extra cards. I'm really regretting not doing this from the start. On a budget it could mean the difference between 35 and 40 education (remember those key numbers).
Lesson 6:
Taxes are atrociously high.
From seeing other new players in the Discord, I think we all had a surprising revelation that even though our income was 50+ SIM a day, we were only receiving 1 or even 0 SIM.
This is because the city tax was 99% or even 100%. This fluctuates day to day based on the price of SIM (and other factors), but not by much.
It's important to budget for some cards to reduce this like a Law Firm or some military cards to get some of the War Tax if you want to get any reasonable amount of SIM as daily income.
Lesson 7:
You don't have to spend all your SIM.
This might seem obvious, but I basically used mine up thinking that was the most cost effective thing to do.
In reality, holding SIM is a key part of the game as it gets you SIM Power which is used in governance. So don't be afraid to sit back and see how things develop and make a game plan for your city.
Holding excess SIM is actually useful.
Lesson 8:
Have fun.
I may wish I had done these things differently, but in the end it was fun to explore what things did. And that's the important thing. For almost no cost, I got to have fun exploring this weird and interesting space.
Now I feel like I have quite a good handle of the basics, so I'm looking forward to exploring some of the more complicated parts and maybe getting into the top 300 in some categories (did I mention that if you rank highly in different categories, you'll get straight-up Hive daily?).