What's the best way to build population early in the game? (building settlers, focusing on food, etc)
Where do you check to see your cities pop.?

Best way:

Changing Government type to Republic. Building 5 small cities around your main one. Creating Settlers in each of them. Sending the Settlers to your main city till it reaches around 30 Population. That will get you 30 Pop in the shortest time...

And you can see it on the world map - it's the number next to the city name.

Thank you another nice little information nugget i did not know what that number was.

Seems like they may have changed it in the latest (v1.10) patch actually... apparently the population only increases upto 10 and then it takes more settlers to increase the population by 1.... not tested by me personally, though I am holding off on installing the download (don't play online so it's fine for me)