Are there better ways to play the game today than when Glarg and CR wrote their guides? Yeah.
Has anyone taken the time to write up a guide for new players that is less outdated than Glarg or CR? We certainly have well written guides on more advanced topics (
@UBERhelp1 comes to mind). And who can forget the epic work put forward by
@WinnerGR).
But no, I don't know of any better guides. Maybe PRJ will take up the challenge? lol.
I have considered it. The problem comes in just restating a lot of what is already there, and as
@DevaCat said, a lot of the commentary is what is so helpful. It's basically 20 pages on how to start off right. But as you said, a lot has changed. HQS isn't as powerful as it once was (debatably), now with event buildings being so powerful those become the primary focus for earlier cities, etc.
In all honesty, I think that the best guide for the game is playing a city without any knowledge about anything. You get somewhere between IA-HMA realizing you did everything wrong (or at least, that's how it went for me, I ended up in a really good guild early on). Then, using that knowledge and the skills you learned from that failure you start a new city doing things right.
The problem with telling someone how to 'start' the game correctly is that by the time they are seeing the info, they are already past it and would have to tear down their city, rebuild, and reassess their playstyle if they wanted to continue playing on the same city. I've tried to help some players, but they don't want to have to recreate a new city to get it to where they are, and so never really fix their mistakes.
Furthermore, with powerful GB being gotten early-game, you don't really have to 'play the game' anymore. You no longer have to care about resources, population, happiness, etc. past maybe IA or EMA, since you have high-age GB providing that for you. If you don't learn how to manage your city without GB, and then start heaping on GB, GE, GBG, settlements, events, and more on top of that, it is pretty overwhelming. Then, once those players reach a point where they do have to start managing resources, they struggle.
And I'm writing a lot more then I meant to when I clicked reply, so sorry for the long post
Oh, and just as a side note, should we still call it Glarging? Because if a player searches for that, nothing will come up since they deleted all the users. Maybe we should start saying "Oh yeah, make sure to follow the DeletedUser10415-ing method of starting the game..."