While some aspects of this game are like a traditional city builder, others are completely different and even counter intuitive. After spending a lot of time playing this game and watching videos explaining various game mechanics to me, I realized that the majority of what I needed to know could have been explained fairly quickly. This is my best effort to explain a few things about this game for experienced players who have played a lot of similar games like Simcity, Rimworld, Civilization, Endless Space, Tropico, Oxygen not Included, etc.

#1 There's no traffic.
In this game it doesn't matter if your people live right next to their "work" or on the other side of the island. Makes no difference. As long as you have enough workers they get to and from work without anything other than a road connecting it.

#2 There's no unemployment.
You can have thousands of workers without a job. Doesn't matter.

#3 All you need is a connection to a warehouse
Much like #1, it doesn't matter if two industries that rely on each other are close or are miles away. As long as an industry is connected to a nearby warehouse it is basically connected to every other warehouse on that island no matter how near or far. Similar industries don't need to be near each other.

#4 Sure, put it in my back yard
Your citizens could care less if there's a steelworks across the street from their house. You can plop a house right in the middle of the most noisy and polluting industries known to man and as long as they've got access to a marketplace and a pub they don't care.

#5 You can move your starting harbor
Unless you've turned off the option to move buildings you can move your starting trade post to a different part of the island. Is your island on the SW corner of the map and the trade post is on the south side of the island? Well use your head and see if there's harbor on the north side of the island and move your trading post over there so ships don't waste time sailing around the island the entire game.

#6 You're just doing the same thing over and over
For better or worse there's not a lot of variety to the basic game play here. Your people need various products. You're going to make those industries on your island and increase them as your population grows. Eventually you'll need basic goods (like hops or sugar cane) that you can't find on your starting island so you'll have to expand to other islands and use ships to transport the goods. That's 90% of the game right there. Eventually you'll get electricity and use it to make even more goods with the same amount of factories but that's about it. This isn't a criticism per se.

#7 You don't actually need to expand to other islands as much as you'd think
Your starting island won't have every crop and fertility available. But, there are a bunch of specialists out there who can make it so you don't need certain items anyways. The costume designer allows you to make fur coats in the Old World and not need an island in the New World to produce cotton for them. And the neutral trader Madame Kahina can trade you Seeds that you equip into a Trade Union that allows you to plant that crop on whatever island you pick (within range of the trade union). You'll definitely want to expand to a few other islands but I wish I hadn't spent so much time and effort trying to produce all the goods I needed on islands with that good/fertility on them and instead had just bought some seeds or found a specialist that eliminates part of the production chain.

#8 The key to making money
There's lots of ways to make money in this game. But by far the easiest is just to identify the handful of items that neutral traders will pay for and just mass produce it. Eli Bleakworth will pay you a lot for soap. So just produce an incredible amount of soap and sell it to him and within the first hour of playing the game you can have all the money you need. Once you get that costume designer and can easily make fur coats and sell them to Madame Kahina, the game is no longer a challenge as you will be so rich you can buy your way out of any problem.

#9 Don't worry about the attractiveness of your island
The only thing attractiveness does is get you tourists who don't really generate significant income compared to other things. It also has a small impact on the happiness of your population. But nowhere near the impact that heavy industry has on most city management games. You can cover your island with pig farms and steelworks and then build one zoo, stock it with mediocre animals, and be in the positive.

#10 Don't worry about the pirates
You'd think pirates would be a major threat. On the contrary they're important to making money in the middle and late game. It doesn't cost much to get a cease fire with them for two hours. You can pay for it with a single shipment of soap to Eli and have money left over. That's enough time to get your entire economy running. By paying a small amount you can keep having cease fires with them which will improve your standing with them until you can get trading rights. Now you can sell beer to them for insane amount of money. Again, at this point, you've basically won and can spend millions of dollars on buying the best specialists and items you can find.

#11 Expeditions will return on their own once they complete their goal
There's a lot of games where you send out expeditions and the goal is to have them turn back to home right before they run out of morale/health/food/etc. Not this game. You send out your expeditions and once they complete a certain number of challenges and have been out long enough they will return to your harbor without needing to be told.

And there you have it, some of the fundamental differences between Anno 1800 and similar games. Are you an experienced player who expected the game to follow certain norms and spent some time figuring out the difference? Feel free to leave a comment and if I think it's a good example I'll add it to the guide. This isn't meant to be comprehensive or have a lot of advice about the game, just some key ideas it does differently than I was used to. I mean most games traffic and not having your industry near your workers is crucial! It's kind of nice playing a game where they aren't but my first play through was seriously slowed by not knowing this. Just trying to help other people out! :) I basically wrote this guide after recommending the game to my sister and giving her a heads up about the differences and then figured other people might benefit from a guide with that purpose.