You think you've seen easy.
My go-to start is to throw down Renewables, Science Funding, wait for People to tick once, and then fast-track Home Wind Farms. Random Events usually stop me from building it optimally, though, forcing me to buy into Societal Change. But if I can get one Home Wind Farm up and running with no more than one People card on the board, I can then throw 20th Century Industry in the garbage right at the start with zero repercussions.
(I might have to grab one or two Ecosystem or Science cards before this, just to stave off the first Tipping Point. Again, a lot of this depends on Random Events.)
From there, it's a brief but slow crawl towards the Big Three cards that are the backbone of my economy: Biodiversity Credits, 30 By 30, and Greening Deserts.At any given point, I'm saving up for whichever of these three is the cheapest, while also buying up one of each of the 1 People cards, so I can boostrap into Carbon Negative, to fund more Industry and Ecosystem cards.
A mature economy starts to run out of growth potential due to diminishing returns around three Carbon Negatives and 3 or so of each of the Big Three. Industry and Ecosystem both both provide industry tokens, for some reason, and tick roughly once every 10 seconds.People ticks at roughly the same rate. There's a huge surplus of Industry tokens, I'm producing negative hundreds of pollution per turn, and if I did it right, I only hit 0-2 tipping points before going negative emissions (through gameplay, I mean,not the card with that name.)
At some point, I probably bought some extra science incubators whenever the science tokens were coming in too slowly, but I never need more than Science Funding and maybe Emissions Cleaning to get my economy off the ground. When diminishing returns start to get really bad, I'll supplement the Big 3 with whatever almost-as-good cards I can afford. Solar Subsidies, Decentralized Power Gird, Sustainable Transport 2, whatever's convenient. You might have to discard freebies the game throws at you in order to make room.
Just for fun, when I start to run out of room, I inevitably sell the windmill that's literally the only power plant on the entire planet, in order to make room for more Biodiversity Credits and Solar Subsidies. (Never any actual solar panels, though. At 1 Industry Token : 1 Pollution, those things are basically fool's gold.)
In conclusion, we are not the same.😂
Edit: I just noticed that Sustainable Transport 2 is actually pretty good mid-game before I go all-in on my first Carbon Negative. That's one of the things I like about this game. The more I play it, the more optimizations I notice in my strategy. Always be on the lookout for 2s you can make using different resources than the current bottleneck. They can speed things up significantly!